Anne Wagner Public Lecture-"Behaving Globally"

Anne M. Wagner

Monday, February 26, 2007
7:30pm, free and open to the public

“Behaving Globally”

“One has no choice,” writes the artist Candice Breitz “if one lives in large urban centers, but to consume the cultural produce of global capitalism. But consumption must be followed by digestion and then excretion.” By these lights globalization is both a somatic experience and a bodily process. But does what passes through us in the guise of global culture leave some structuring trace? When does performance stop, if at all? This lecture considers various contemporary efforts to figure these issues, not least through what sets them apart from the main assumptions of 1970s approaches to cultural imperialism. Globalized behavior, it seems, cannot simply be understood as hegemonically imposed. Anne M. Wagner is an art historian who has published widely on nineteenth-and twentieth-century art. Since 1988, she has been a professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.