About Art Without Borders

In 15 years the world has changed dramatically, yet few of us have seen that change in a way that registered meaning and human content. In the abstract, we understand that the end of Communism meant the end of an era in Belarus, that in an Indian village a solar powered, Internet capable computer is epochal, too, and that there is something amusing and upsetting in Mongolian teenagers lip synching Britney Spears. Yet, in a time when technology gives us instant access to images of elsewhere via CNN, that same technology, by reducing all it covers to “news,” has stripped what we see of any sense of familiarity. And we are not alone. Most people in the world see images of people who live in a world of big cars, big houses, big meals and big possibilities at least as bizarre to them as their world is to us.

However, there is hope that we could grasp both the universal and the local experience of these vast changes. Everywhere artists have been watching, recording and struggling to understand this revolution. That is what artists do; capture grand, sweeping processes and universals in unique and immediate expression. What if we could see how Zambian artists “make sense” of AIDS? How Chinese artists incorporate the iconographies of consumerism and Communism? What if we could consider women and/in Islam by comparing images of women by Muslim artists from Mali to In donesia? What if we could ask “what is ‘our’ relationship to the land?” and could answer not with the mono-perspective photographs of National Geographic, but with images by artists from around the world for whom the specific landscapes have meaning beyond the abstract meaning of ‘biosphere’?

Four problems stand in the way: cost; visibility; the lack of functioning art markets; and the resulting inability of artists to support themselves as artists able to participate in such a venture.

As they have, their future production has been lost, as have the possibilities for local economic revitalization that often accompany the establishment of artists’ communities and art markets in run-down neighborhoods. This constitutes an international phenomenon, as developments in Gdansk, Poland and Beijing, China, clearly demonstrate.

The challenge is straightforward: How do we conceive and mount art exhibitions that bring together the work of artists from around the globe cost-effectively and despite the absence of functioning art markets? And, at the same time, how do we contribute to the development of local art markets and to the possibility that artists outside the rich art market countries of North America and Western Europe can support themselves as artists.

The Internet offers an elegant and powerful response, and Art Without Borders is our specific solution.

We do not pretend that viewing digital images on the Internet is or will ever be a substitute for viewing real art objects. We are aware of the limits of technology as a medium for rendering even visual reproductions of images, let alone capturing the subtleties of texture, light on paint, weight of paper, and volume in sculpture. Our argument for Art Without Borders is not that it is an optimal solution. However, it is a much better solution than no solution at all to the problem of image sharing and understanding, and it is actually a very powerful solution to the more mundane tasks we have set: encouraging sales by providing secure transactions capabilities, permitting learning to take place by offering educational materials and virtual classrooms, and creating new knowledge by facilitating online discussions in communities called into existence by Art Without Borders.