“I am forgetting the art world. It’s going now—and fast” (2). These are the words that inaugurate Pamela Lee’s new book, a study of the impact of globalization on contemporary art practice. They seem initially to describe her growing fatigue with the art world’s rapid fashion cycle of artists, styles, and theorists du jour—an understandable if prosaic exhaustion. Quickly, though, the problem she means to articulate becomes more serious and encompassing, if more difficult to pin down. Detached from the problematics of medium and the social formations of bohemia and the avant-garde, the art world accelerates and sprawls, such that “its maps can no longer be read as fixed or stable, [and] its borders [are] blurred at best” (2). At the same time, and according to the same logic, the very modifier “art,” subject to a “routinization of its procedures,” colonization by creative industries, and relentless mediation, seems to mean less and less (2). No longer capable of dreaming of art’s difference from the world, or insisting on the specificity of art’s activities and products, artists and historians bear witness to “a certain eclipse of a historical notion of the art world” (3).

What is eclipsed, Lee argues, is a particular notion of art’s distance from the world as such. She quotes Arthur Danto: “The art world stands to the real world in something like the relationship in which the City of God stands to the earthly city” (19). This distance or incongruity allowed art a remove from the “crass workings of the everyday world down below” (19)—allowed it, that is, to be critical. Whether this is an accurate depiction of art’s autonomy, historically or in Danto’s moment, Lee’s account makes clear that now, the heavenly city has fallen to earth. Drawing on George Yúdice’s 2003 book The Expediency of Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), she argues that art has become one more instrument in an increasingly managerialized and globalized society, cognate with late capitalism and the manipulations of the state. Under such conditions, she avers, art is but one among many creative industries and entertainments; it is not different. This difference is what is being forgotten.

This spells trouble for art history, as Lee sees it, inasmuch as its discussions still circle melancholically around such questions of autonomy, in increasingly desperate pursuit of a kernel of criticality in an otherwise compromised shell. With the dialectic of complicity or critique resolved in favor of the former, how should art history continue its work? How, that is, to circumvent the gloomy impasses of Daniel Bell or Hilton Kramer or (in a different position on the politico-aesthetic spectrum) the indictments of Julian Stallabrass? Her answer, which builds on her previous book, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) (click here for review), is to consider the work of art as both “enmeshed” in geopolitical and economic interests, and “enabling” of them: “contemporary art . . . registers its geopolitical interests through either a literal or a metonymic enabling of such processes and their distribution,” she writes (24–25). To approach works of art in this way is to understand their “form as above all formative in a dynamic of globalization that can only be thought as relational and material” (25; emphasis in original). To interrogate “the work of art’s world”—this is her Heideggerean phrasing of her method—one must consider the work of art not as a passive product that might later be probed by the scholar or viewer, but as itself a process of producing and forming a world. Do this and some glimmer of political imagination, not to say utopian figuring, might yet be detected—even if it is forever forced into a doomed double identity with its complicit and globalized inverse.

The section in which she articulates this methodological point is brief, and its language elliptical. What will this look like in practice? The case study that follows, of two films, Unexploded and Gravesend (both 2007), by Steve McQueen, offers evidence. Gravesend, for example, offers up a disjointed and openly abstract image of the excavation and circulation of the mineral Coltan, a conductor with countless uses in the globalized market, from nuclear weapon systems to mobile phones. Moving in nonlinear fashion between grimy Congolese mines and a processing laboratory/factory in Gravesend, UK, McQueen’s film makes visible the ugly disparities between one sort of work and another, and materializes disruptively the myths of free trade and infinite mobility that support a globalized consumerism. For Lee, the abstractions of his film are the crux of the matter. In its form, the film exposes and allegorizes how a bare element gives way to the false transparencies and confounding circulations of global capital—a circulation registered, as it were, only in the film’s disarrangements and absences (en creux, as Louis Althusser once put it).

In the two extraordinary chapters that follow, the value of this project comes clear. Considering, in turn, the cartoonish productions of Takashi Murakami and the digitally altered photography of Andreas Gursky, Lee attends to the complex relationships between the artists’ forms of production and circulation in systems of global exchange, and the artworks that result. The chapter on Murakami moves through a reading of Murakami’s public manifestations (artworks and installations, books, interviews and reviews, and the commodity universe of Murakami schwag) to his Kaikai Kiki “factory” in Asaka, Japan—which, Lee discovers, looks more like an artisanal and technologized design studio than an industrial plant. She ties Murakami’s studio to ideas of “just-in-time” production established in the 1930s at the Ford River Rouge automobile factory and revolutionized by Taiichi Ohno and others at Toyota in the 1960s and 1970s, before elaborating, in the chapter’s best passage, on the phenomena of “scalability” and “flexibility” in the infinitely reproducible paintings that result. Considering artistic production at its ground level—and relying on the account of Chiho Aoshima, a member of Murakami’s digital drawing staff, describing the process of the works’ articulation as it shifts back and forth between Murakami’s drawings and the “skins” and “Bézier curves” of Adobe Illustrator—reveals something essential about the form of this artwork, and the “world” it imagines. The “infinitely elastic” is secreted everywhere in Murakami’s productions, from the conditions of labor they demand, to their forms of distribution, to the mutant plasticity of their cartoon subjects.

A similar approach is taken in the chapter on Gursky, giving his images of global trade (in particular a reading of his 1990 photograph Salerno, a pristine image of a Southern Italian shipping center) a materialist edge. Her analysis zeroes in on the matrix of rasterized pixels that constitute the images; here the phenomenon of globalization is what is pictured and (in the form of the Adobe Photoshop software) what is doing the picturing. As she did with McQueen and Murakami, Lee carries this knowledge into an analysis of the works, whose peculiar “refusal of optical traction” she traces to a sort of absent-present “ether” or “general illumination”—terms she draws from Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, which describe how a dominant mode of production (capitalism) might relate to all its specific instances as a sort of governing force. Impossible to represent as such, this ether, Lee contends (quoting Marx), nevertheless “determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it”—and along the way puts into words what is so alluring and off-putting about Gursky’s photographs (87).

One might expect Lee to carry this form of analysis, moving from the public forms of the work toward a theorization of production at the material level, into the case studies in the second half of her book: chapters on Thomas Hirschhorn and “pseudo-collectivism” in the guise of Raqs Media Collective and the Atlas Group. Contentiously, this is not what happens at all. The Hirschhorn chapter locates its ground early on by describing his work as a graphic designer in the 1980s (including his momentary employment with politicized design atelier Grapus) and reading his artworks by way of total design and display; but Lee then follows off a cliff the artist’s philosophical obsessions and prodigious productivity. The garrulous, unstable form of the work itself might be the problem, inasmuch as it focuses attention less on specific products (artworks) than on the artist’s “causal and active mode” (144). But this substitution would seem to lead less to the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (as it does here, following Hirschhorn’s own bibliography) and instead back to the post-Fordist theories addressed in the book’s early pages—that is, to a culture industry increasingly fixated on performative, charismatic, “virtuosic” labor. (A look into the conditions of labor needed to produce his sprawling installations, too, might have yielded counter-reflections relevant to the book’s purpose; instead one gets the impression that this stuff appears as if from the great artist’s own hand. Who is Hirschhorn’s Chiho Aoshima?)

The final chapter spends its first half on a suggestive synthesis of theories of collectivity and sovereignty in a consumer society, cycling quickly through the Invisible Committee, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben among others, but its turn toward the Atlas Group and Raqs reads as somewhat non sequitur (the beauty of the writing here is some consolation). As with Hirschhorn, Lee’s analysis of their “causal mode” displaces her sharp theorization of what that mode generates; instead one is left wondering what these enigmatic practices might have at stake, beyond the tactic, or pose, of collectivism and secrecy. The Invisible Committee’s ferocious call for revolution here and now, Raqs’s anxious stitching together of a digital commons for North Delhi (in the place of what missing public?), or the Atlas Group’s allegorical enumeration of the tragedies and dehumanizations of a particular war—these are set aside, more or less.

But perhaps this is Lee’s point. Over its course the book stages its “lack of traction,” enacts its own forgetting. Her dialectic falls out of joint. The overall trajectory is from an artist of enormous public profile (Murakami) toward practices, ever more tenuously related to “Art” and its markets, that enact their dissolution into obscurity or the internet. The conclusion eschews conventional summings-up (Danto’s City of God is invoked, but the artists of the chapters go unmentioned), instead meditating on the bewildering proximity of far-flung places and people enacted by the internet: spam emails in U.S. inboxes from Nigeria and Ukraine, attacks on Facebook from state hackers in Beijing, distress calls on Twitter from dissident artist Ai Weiwei. In these moments, “seemingly inconsequential messages” (190) suddenly pitch their distant reader into the black holes of poverty, famine, and state repression that are consequences of globalism’s “free trade”—that is, before pulling them back out again, blinking, into the web’s distractions and dissociations. This is the latest form of the vertigo that Fredric Jameson has diagnosed as a key affect of postmodern life. “We know that we are caught within these more complex global networks,” he writes, “because we palpably suffer the prolongations of corporate space everywhere in our daily lives. Yet we have no way of thinking about them, of modeling them, however abstractly, in our mind’s eye” (Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, 127). But whether this incapacity signals the eclipse of an art world or proposes new tasks for art’s “worlding” is still worth deciding. In posing the question, Lee’s book brings us closer to being able to make this choice.