The Global Art Fair and the Dialectical Image

The notion that the global art fair is the new entity for the globalised art institution – biennials and triennials transcending old nationalist orders for art – requires a better understanding of their historical structures. Rather than a product of innovation, its organising principle originated in the nineteenth century when nearly every colonial world exposition included palaces devoted to fine art. The art fairs inhabit the ‘image as dialectics at a standstill’ in the manner that Walter Benjamin describes the historical phenomenon of the arcades as the spectre of the history of empire, for ‘the relation of what‐has‐been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent’. To view the fair as the ‘wish image’ of globalisation is to transfigure into the present what art fairs stood for in the past in terms of empire and commodity culture.