The fine arts (visual arts) have served as the foundational institute for the emergence of globalization in its comprehensive meaning
Souad Khalil | Libya
Arts are diverse, and the creative process of perception is affirmed in discovering distinction and wonder, leading to deeper understanding and comprehensive insight. This allows for the extraction of philosophical and aesthetic meanings that shape the artist’s vision, whose renewed creativity is etched into the vocabulary of time. Consequently, countless forms of art have emerged, transcending both form and essence.
Visual arts, as one of the expressive arts, engage the senses and shape perceptions through their styles, techniques, and visual and cognitive references. They represent a first-rate human creative endeavor. We can consider it a continuation of accumulated social and cultural influences, connecting a cosmic system of ideas, values, and aesthetics in their spatial and temporal variability and their spiritual and material significance. This is also influenced by the impulses of survival and displacement due to the dominance of power and the social model that wields authority over thought, culture, and the aesthetics of the center, along with its ability to link the culture of the periphery with its absorptive capacity.
As we often note, visual arts, like all forms of art, are necessarily a social activity that shapes the individual as a gifted and refined entity, the first building block and active step in the creative ego, influenced by intuition, imagination, culture, and the perceptions of the social and environmental reality. The geographical boundaries available to the collective self form the details of identity and the dynamics of the community (the “I” and “we”), merging individuals into a unified whole.
In this article, we will highlight the role of visual arts as a visual, intellectual, and aesthetic value within the global cultural discourse, serving as a universal language that enters the realm of globalization in all its manifestations.
In this context, I read a study by Abdullah Abu Rashed about the arts and how they serve as a primary threshold to globalization. Due to the significance and depth of this study, I will summarize its key points.
He states that visual arts have been and continue to be a fertile ground and a favorable climate for the winds of control and the penetration of global periods in their temporal and leadership variations. In other words, the dominance of the prevailing social, political, and economic system imposes itself as an ideal model for the benefits of peoples, nations, and ethnicities, considering its alienating self as the center of the cosmic galaxy and the pathway to safety and everlasting happiness. This repetitive and shifting globalization alters social and ideological forms influenced by the logic of power, seizing all the dynamics of global movement, encompassing its material, human, and spiritual components. Globalization continuously asserts itself as the center of the universe. The current globalization, or “Americanization,” is merely a result of numerous dynamics and qualitative shifts in the historical trajectory of human society. It is an overwhelming globalization that transcends previous patterns of hegemony, entering through the gateway of universality to create innovative mechanisms that supersede past models. Thus, the image—the visual perceptions—becomes the logical outcome of the visual representations of visual arts.
Globalization eliminates the duality of the two global poles, establishing the riddle of the global pole, with countries on the periphery serving the global center, where America occupies this center with its technical, financial, cognitive, military, economic, and aesthetic prowess. The current globalization, in the logic of hegemony and containment, does not penetrate the culture of the other, divorced from the dynamics of visual arts as a prior visual language to image technology. Instead, this creative human field serves as the primary conduit for realizing the dynamics of the global situation across other absorptive paths—economically, politically, militarily, technically, and culturally. It is the objective equivalent and suitable ground for all these penetrations into the cultures of peoples and the globe.
The fine arts (visual arts) have served as the foundational institute for the emergence of globalization in its comprehensive meaning, concerning the dynamics of excitement, motivation, visual and emotional possession, and values that enter our souls, bringing joy and tranquility, and aligning us with their aesthetic perceptions as a form of cultural interaction expressing an intuition that resides in hearts and manifests in emotional and impressionistic sensations accepting their mechanisms, domains, and dazzling techniques.
In this context, visual arts become the easiest and most dangerous gateway to penetrating minds and building a sensory visual culture prior to cognitive activation (formal perceptions), touching on the specificity of social strata, the elite class, and cultural nuances, as it is a human message filled with symbols and signs aimed at awakening visual memory in a conscious effort to activate cognitive and aesthetic perceptions, dedicated to the aesthetics of place and the perceptions of existence, objects, and beings, and the sensory and emotional interactions of individuals within specific cultural frameworks. This transcends the limitations of linguistic expression, literary description, geography, nationalities, and cultures, as well as the manifestations of human civilization in changing global garments according to the culture of the center and its tendencies to achieve physical penetration through the cultural front and via the umbrella of globalization and modernity at times, and the arts of postmodernity at others.
Thus, visual arts, as a visual, intellectual, and aesthetic value, are under the hammer of global cultural discourse, becoming an appropriate medium for entering the realm of globalization in all its manifestations—taste, visual and aesthetic appreciation, criticism, and utility—reflecting a community culture that mirrors the spirit of the dominant and prevailing culture according to this or that global trajectory. Consequently, there is a total acquisition of the mechanisms of interaction with the artistic product—concepts, theories, and practical applications, both aesthetic and commercial—more comprehensively absorbing the innovative human self and appropriating the culture of the other artistically, aesthetically, and intellectually. This solidifies the narrow individualistic tendencies, which are independent of their collective surroundings, falling within the context of star-making policies and establishing an artistic foundation that supports and nurtures the fields of visual arts culturally, aesthetically, financially, and with an interacting audience, driven by an intentional purpose to generalize the culture and visuals of the dominant global model in visual arts as an artistic self aligned with the spirit of the thought and policies controlling the activities of the cosmic community and its existential data materially, intellectually, and humanly. It proposes a cultural and visual model based on normative and value frameworks that express its true essence, aiming to spread culture and build its fragile dynamics, replacing and altering the culture of this or that community. This is evident in the historical context of tracking historical milestones, changes, and the patterns of its existence in visual arts from ancient times to the present.
Modern arts in visual arts, which emerged amidst cultural burdens and more deviant and penetrating visual discourses than the global eras themselves, play a functional role in penetrating vision as a natural precursor to penetrating minds and ideas. The noticeable displacements in all knowledge fields and what they propose in the commodity market reflect a culture of alienation that activates deliberate patterns of communication and interaction with aesthetics, cultures, relationships, tastes, and classes, dedicated to global concepts operating under pragmatic paths of development and progress, keeping pace with the spirit of the era and its scientific and technological changes, and the dynamics of star-making at times, and the illusion of universality in most cases. The deliberate methodological absurdity aims to dismantle the walls of academia, innovation, and the specificities and aesthetics of place and human culture, leading to a smooth yet suspicious transition towards European central tendencies in art, culminating in contemporary global (American) tendencies, surpassing in its data, culture, perceptions, and formal visual vocabularies, and its intellectual and aesthetic content the existential values of humanity, reducing it to a mere commercial commodity registered in the global art stock market, akin to other industrial products that achieve profit and accumulate wealth and added value for capital in a clear nihilistic utility, held by a small elite.
In this study, it is stated that both ancient and modern visual arts do not fall within the framework of being a predominantly European art in terms of visual, technical, intellectual, and methodological aesthetics. The European central tendencies in visual arts serve as a descriptive metaphor for the artistic globalization that has indeed materialized in the cultural landscape across all facets of the cosmic map, through the generalization of the European-Western model in visual arts across all disciplines, which is forcibly imposed in one way or another on all countries, peoples, and academic institutions, establishing a comprehensive hegemony, serving as a visual and cognitive memory dedicated to European-Western concepts, ideas, values, literature, and theories. Was not visual and sculptural art in the hands of priests and temple keepers, producing its productive effects through its elite exclusivity, resulting in dozens of artworks as symbolic and referential indicators of the influence and control of the ruling social classes who possess the dynamics of reality and hold the keys to its culture and components? Did not the arts of the Greeks and Romans reflect the effects and aesthetics of the spirit of the ruling social culture, establishing elite artistic models aligned with these classes? Are not the Italian Renaissance arts and the revivalist artistic schools, which were born from Greek and Roman arts, dedicated to the birth of central tendencies and the culture of the European center as visual and cultural references, guiding all scholars, researchers, enthusiasts, and professionals from all corners of the earth? Have not European modern arts, in turn, constituted a continuous fabric of globalization in visual arts within its human visual and cognitive context, functioning as an objective, analogous counterpart to the innovation of other creative platforms, leading to nihilistic postmodern arts (objectivity) as a formal counterpart to the culture of the dominant globalization (Americanization) in the domains of politics, thought, culture, aesthetics, science, and information technology? Can we not assert that visual arts serve as a sensory culture that precedes cultural penetrations in generalizing the culture of the self in the other, rendering it dependent in the orbit of the center’s references, existing within diverse and multiple patterns and roles, with Arab expressions of “Orientalism” as a primary example?
Visual arts, as an innovative product, its components, audience, and promoters, are based on the law of containment and dependency on the other’s culture and model. It is well known that the elite and cultured aristocratic classes capture this and support it with all necessary financial and media resources, as this elite class has its intentional goals and purposes. Visual arts have always been an elite art, and they cannot remain otherwise; they are appreciated and produced by (especially) the wealthy few who own capital, from ancient times to the present day. The artistic product, whether innovative or produced, and its audience can only be aligned with its elitist nature; it cannot become a culture for the general public that sustains it like daily bread or a popular phenomenon.
The allure of visual perceptions, as an image produced by human hands, offers familiar sensory perceptions to the recipient, varying according to their levels, genres, and modes of consciousness, culture, and references. These visual repetitions and intentional scenic positions become a form of “familiar habit” and a culturally accepted traditional norm in artistic products that correspond to and imitate elite artistic moods tethered to the references of the center’s culture.
The artistic painting has been the vital field for exercising the initial visual-haptic penetration of the effects of artistic globalization in its visual determinants and historical development, matching the symbolic culture of ruling societies. This transforms immediate, fleeting sensory perceptions into stable cognitive perceptions that, over time, evolve into contemplative moments that embody admiration of the moment and engage cognitive and imaginative faculties. The smooth transition from spontaneous sensory experiences to intentional sensory pathways—cognitive perceptions—accepting the model as a cultural and visual event that cannot be dispensed with, serving as cultural references and a renewable visual memory that cannot be escaped, seizing the dynamics of hegemony through the effects of sensory perceptions leading to cognitive perceptions and permanent referential tendencies.
The recipient interacting with interactive visual spectacles across various levels is led from a moment of emotional astonishment and imaginative visual dynamics to contemplative-intellectual intuitions interacting with the surfaces of the painting, its material, techniques, lines, colors, and the cosmic structures of artistic vocabulary, creating a sense of momentary admiration and entering the realm of globalization in dependency and imitative layering in themes, subjects, and symbols, along with the techniques employed. Its innovations become a refined human self, shaped by the allure of globalization and the drift towards embodying the culture of the dominant global center.
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Souad Khalil, hailing from Libya, is a writer, poet, and translator. She has been writing on culture, literature and other general topics.
All images provided by the author
