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This article explores why New York City's municipal government, together with private benefactors, poured an unprecedented amount of money into the arts during the 1980s, a time of broader austerity. While other public expenditures saw dramatic cuts, the arts were considered essential to the city's future as a center for global capital—as a way to lure financial elites and young professionals to the city, create new forms of revenue-raising consumption, and cement New York's reputation as the ultimate global city. New York had always had a vital arts scene. But in the 1980s, the arts were monetized in new ways to serve capital—and capitalists. Arts and culture were central to the new urban lifestyle that helped produce the explosion of global finance. But as arts and culture increasingly came to be associated with a luxury lifestyle, the arts themselves became a luxury, inaccessible to most New Yorkers.

The article examines writings on the history of art, in which artworks by Soviet artists are described not as a local phenomenon but in a global cultural context. These writings are combined into four blocks. The first block – "Socialist Internationalism" – explores papers by Soviet art historians written in the 1950s and 1960s and developed a conception of world "progressive art." The second block – "Soviet Non-official art and Western art critic" – starts with analyzing the texts created in the 1970s – 1990s by European, American, and Soviet – émigré authors and ends with the writings by Russian curators of the 2000s. All the articles from this block represent a common idea of the universality of Western modernist and postmodern art theory. Thus, these authors selected only those artworks which could be described within this theory. In the context of contemporary European and American art trends, Soviet non-official art looks like a peripheral phenomenon. The third block – "Cold War and Global History of Art" – investigates the texts and exhibitions made during the last two decades and influenced by the ideas of global turn and critical research of the Cold War cultural policy. It is shown how art historians seek to develop new approaches and universal criteria to describe the 20th century world art. The last block – "Critical geography" – talks about the theoretical approach elaborated by Piotr Piotrowski. Within the framework of critical geography, the phenomena that have long been considered marginal come to the fore. Attention is paid to the international contacts of artists. The boundaries of art centers are shown to be different from the borders of states. Thus, the art of the Soviet artists is represented as part of the new geographic conglomerations.

Through its embrace of the 'cultural turn' and the 'practice turn' in cultural sociology, recent work in the subfield of arts sociology has helped to advance our understanding of the role of culture in social life through its focus on arts-in-action. Empirically, this focus grew out of earlier work in the production and consumption of the arts, while, theoretically, it resonates with traditions within ethnomethodology, cognitive sociology, and the sociology of science and technology. The authors describe how new work in arts sociology unearths and develops our understanding of aesthetic consciousness, the tacit and often embodied bases of action, cognition, and engagement with cultural forms. This recent emphasis on materials and actions in turn permits critique of rule-based and more overtly cognitive models of agency structure. It also leads some of its proponents into areas that would not normally be viewed as topics for the field. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2008 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

Through its embrace of the "cultural turn" and the "practice turn" in cultural sociology, recent work in the subfield of arts sociology has helped to advance our understanding of the role of culture in social life through its focus on arts-in-action. Empirically, this focus grew out of earlier work in the production and consumption of the arts, while, theoretically, it resonates with traditions within ethnomethodology, cognitive sociology, and the sociology of science and technology. The authors describe how new work in arts sociology unearths and develops our understanding of aesthetic consciousness, the tacit and often embodied bases of action, cognition, and engagement with cultural forms. This recent emphasis on materials and actions in turn permits critique of rule-based and more overtly cognitive models of agency structure. It also leads some of its proponents into areas that would not normally be viewed as topics for the field.

"This book explores how contemporary art can alter the ways in which we visualise and conceptualise the world and the social relations that shape it. Drawing from the writings of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, it spotlights the concept of 'world-forming' and the political significance of art-making and viewing. The central theme of 'world-forming' focuses attention on the processes of globalisation. The book explores how artists can facilitate shared creative spaces within and beyond the apparatuses of global capitalism. The book traces a philosophical progression from ontology to the political through a series of participatory practices. It forwards Jean-Luc Nancy's idea of 'world-forming' in order to show how contemporary art sustains critical and creative engagement with social practices. The overall objective of the book is to show, through participatory practices, how contemporary art can facilitate social change. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, philosophy, and politics"--