The choice of this theme for debate has been stimulated by recent discussions of the globalization of art history, and the increasing emphasis placed in the discipline on the notion of "world art history," perhaps best exemplified by the books of James Elkins and David Summers: James Elkins, Is Art History Global? and David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. 1 Most of the discussion has focused on Renaissance and later art, but the purpose of this debate is to reflect on the relevance of these debates in particular in relation to the art of "ancient worlds." Jeremy Tanner.What do you regard as the major factors that lie behind the rise of "world art history," and what factors would you see as driving developing patterns of interest in world art history today and in the next decade or two?What would you see as the relationship between world art history and broader social-cultural transformations such as "globalization"?Jas ´ Elsner.When I began in the game of art history (my first junior job was at the Courtauld Institute in 1991), the subject, as taught in Europe and America, was largely about Western art.In many ways it was a cultural apologetics for European culture and education, presented as the canonical selection of the noblest masterpieces in the visual field, with after the 1980s an edge of cultural critique (sexuality politics, ideological analysis, deconstruction, postcolonialism) among the young, that could be vicious and polarizing in relation to the older generation.This has changed.The impact of globalization on the discipline -not only a vastly more interconnected world as well as the rise of the Far East (China, Japan, Korea), the Indian subcontinent and Latin America as major economic forces, but also the political pressures of crisis in central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe and the Balkans -has gone hand in hand with the rise of world art history, especially in the United States.What this means institutionally is not a unified field or a single discipline, but the pressure of educated ethnic groups in the US demanding and receiving a voice for the arts of their ancestral cultures within the university system -Chinese, Indian, Afro-American, African, Meso-American, Iranian, Jewish and so forth.This has led to a wholesale reinvention of the discipline in the country of its strongest professional presence and its largest body of teachers, researchers and students.Instead of having an expert in every century of European and North American art, the numbers in these traditional fields went down and posts went instead to the variety of areas of world art (meaning essentially non-European).The old "art history survey" -a venerable form of lecture series that focused chronologically almost entirely on Western art -was scrapped in favor of all kinds of methodological, historiographic, theoretical and multicultural experiments.
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