Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination
About this ebook
The development of a cosmopolitan imagination is crucial to engendering a global sense of ethical and political responsibility. By materialising concepts and meanings beyond the limits of a narrow individualism, art plays an important role in this development, enabling us to encounter difference, imagine change and make possible the new. This book asks what it means to inhabit a globalized world – how we might literally and figuratively make ourselves cosmopolitans, ‘at home’ everywhere. Contemporary art provides a space for this enquiry.
Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination is structured and written through four ‘architectonic figurations’ – foundation, threshold, passage and landing – which simultaneously reference the built environment and the transformative structure of knowledge-systems. It offers a challenging new direction in the current literature on cosmopolitanism, globalisation and art.
About the author
Dr. Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Loughborough, UK. Her research centres on the work of women artists and expanded theoretical and critical perspectives on aesthetics, history and gendered subjectivity. She has authored a number of books and journal articles, including Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003) and We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (1999).
