Transformed from the Inside Out

Dak'Art, Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain, is built from within, not without, argues Joanna Grabski in Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar. The Dak'Art Biennale reflects the artists, the urban context in which they create, and art-world globalization. From this artistic activity, the art world is structured, even if an infrastructure of museums, auction houses, and gallery spaces is not readily apparent to visitors to Dakar. Senegal's first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, supported the arts during his presidency, from 1960 to 1980, but state-supported institutions of arts and culture and their collections declined soon after, in the period of economic stagnation ushered in by economic liberalization. Institutions such as the library and museum of the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, the Théâtre National Daniel Sorano, the Manufacture Nationale de Tapisserie, the Musée Dynamique, the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, and the École Normale Supérieure d'Éducation Artistique struggled without state support. And yet today, Dakar is a thriving center for the visual and performing arts, as well as for literature and fashion. How this has come to be is the story that Art World City tells.

Like an ethnographer of art, Grabski weaves this book from insider narratives and experience in Dakar's art world. This is not a book about art and artists in Dakar as subject matter: it is, rather, about artists as collaborators, as critical, thoughtful interlocutors, whose own insights often create new critical perspectives, which run ahead of the extant scholarship. Grabski's insider perspective has produced an innovative book on three fronts.

First, Art World City presents the fieldsite not as a bounded community, city, or nation-state, or even an institutional site like a museum, but as constituted through a nexus of transactions in which artist and studio are at the center. She traces how these transactions are constituted and how they reveal the dynamics of Dakar's art scene and its intersections with global art-world trends. This perspective on art from the global south echoes Jean and John Comaroff's argument in Theory from the South, that "contemporary world-historical processes are disrupting received geographies of core and periphery, relocating southward—and, of course, eastward as well—some of the most innovative and energetic modes of producing value" (2011, 7). In Dakar, Grabski argues, new modes of producing value abound, from the studios where artists transact art, to the NGOs that patronize the arts and artists. The biennale and its location in Dakar thus provide a context for understanding new modes of value production in the art system from the south.

Second, the book analyzes transformations in Dakar over time (1998–2015). Through field-based collaborative research with artists, Grabski shows how their works of art are motivated by, and are the outcome of, dynamic urban life. She presents the shifting social and economic context of the city over time in which artists work and which gives meaning to their creations.

Third, the book relates the materials of artistic creativity to theoretical perspectives on materiality. Grabski analyzes the work performed by material objects in the visual culture of the city. She offers a sensual—as well as material and visual—ethnography of the relationship between artists and material culture.

Art from the South

According to Grabski, the art world city is "a multiscalar urban site for artistic production, mediation, and transaction" (2017, 3). In this site, creative work and transactions, the urban context, and global currents converge through exhibitions, narratives, and networks shaped in artists' studios. The network materializes, becomes visible and obvious, when journalists, artists, gallerists, buyers, artists, diplomats, and collectors come together. The art world city is the site where buyers and sellers interact and converge with "the many artistic propositions that engage the city's visual, material, and spatial fields" (2017, 3). Like Dakar itself, it "emerges from and is shaped by the opportunities of urban life" (2017, 3).

Grabski conceptualizes the global art world not as exclusively comprised of blockbuster museum exhibitions, biennales, and art fairs, all of which...