Third Text

Introduction »

Jonathan Harris 

These essays and artworks indicate the complexity of issues that any cursory consideration of globalization’s relation to contemporary art entails. What is globalization itself?

Reclaim The Streets! »

Julia Ramírez Blanco

Throughout the nineties, the ‘social turn’ in art can be paralleled to an ‘artistic’ or ‘creative turn’ in activism. This article examines the visual and utopian aspects of Reclaim the Streets (RTS). Operating between 1995 and 2000, RTS was a British collective that organized sudden street parties that temporally disrupted the capitalist city. This originally local phenomenon expanded and finally merged with the alter globalization movement. Julia Ramírez Blanco argues that RTS contributed to a new global aesthetics of protest, where the subversive spirit of Carnival comes together with utopian dreams of a better society.

Living in a Global ‘Society of the Spectacle’ »

Bill Balaskas

Bill Balaskas returns to Guy Debord's seminal work La Société du spectacle in the context of the global economic crisis of 2008–2012, and of his own solo exhibition ‘Le Temps Spectaculaire’ at the Institut Français de Thessalonique, Greece, which marked the eightieth anniversary of Debord’s birth. This article elaborates on the distinct aspects of spectacle that were investigated in the exhibition through a brief analysis of the works.

Three Notes »

The short contributions here by Anna Maria Guasch, Menene Gras and Paula Barreiro López are short meditations on paradoxical aspects of globalized art today.