cover image Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture

Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture

. MIT Press (MA), $40 (441pp) ISBN 978-0-262-13440-8

New Museum of Contemporary Art curator Mosquera and Royal College of Art lecturer Fisher bring together more than 20 polemical reflections on art's place within the global exchange of ideas, goods and works in this follow up to the seminal Out There (MIT, 1990). Among the pieces included here are Apinan Poshyananda's ""Desperately Diasporic,"" which critiques the West's rush to market ""global"" art, and Carolina Ponce de Leon's ""Encounters and Disencounters,"" which draws out the meanings of the term ""displacement"" by detailing the author's childhood as ""an imaginary Colombian,"" her return to her family's country after a childhood in New York and Paris, and her most recent stint in the Big Apple. Some of the contributions are abstrusely theoretical. Others are playfully serious, such as Jalal Toufic's ""Transit Visa to Postwar Lebanon!"" In addressing ""Transcultural Circuits"" and ""Unbounded Totalities,"" the editors go far in penetrating ""The Museological Unconscious"" that underlies everything from art making, collecting and displaying to the ways people can and can't reach ""Over Here.""