Dakar and Contemporary Art Criticism

Art World City is a careful examination of the networks, substances, circumstances, and configuration of the art world in Dakar, Senegal. It is unique among studies of art in Senegal, whose primary interpretive lens has been nationalism. It broadens the field of urban studies, which has so far downplayed the art sector. If, as some urban theorists have argued, the world is one enormous city, then parsing how artists interface with international galleries, exhibitions, and collectors is a key aspect of describing how artists practice art in Dakar. Urbanism and its cultures have been a focus of scholars like Saskia Sassen for more than twenty years, but urbanism, which has seemed to stress the context of art more than art itself, has been slow to be adopted in art history. Art World City does both. It joins other compelling books, such as Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall's Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008), that imbricate the conceptual and tectonic layers of the city.

Art World City is part sociology and part art world exposé. It is unsystematic in its analysis of Dakar, but it emphasizes from the beginning that Dakar is unusual in the art world for the level of its use of the city as a stage for visibility; the term in Dakar is animation artistique. Grabski, in her introduction, writes that art events "were gathering sites where the city's art scene—artists, journalists, critics, animateurs d'art, diplomats, and collectors—made itself visible" (1). Joe Ouakam, the legendary and recently deceased Dakarois artist, is emblematic in this regard: Grabski explains that his whole persona as an artist was caught up in his visibility, to the extent that his presence eclipsed his art. From the chapter on visibility, Grabski is more specific about the nature of encounters, whether in artists' studios, the Dak'Art Biennale, galleries, and so forth. In a few sections, she moves into the interpretive mode of specific works of art—which contrasts with the overall thrust of the book.

Art World City was not written, however, in the service of globalist theory. Instead, and this is due to her obvious networking skills, Grabski presents readers with an insider's view of Dakar and its art scene, the granular aspects of its working, and demonstrates Dakar's distinction from the art worlds of other cities. Those of us who work on contemporary art know how hard it can be to penetrate any scene, and this book is nearly a handbook on Dakar's dynamics by someone who knows the city intimately. We learn how determined Dakar artists are to sell to local as well as international collectors and the unusual control they exercise over their careers, to an extent that is nearly unthinkable in other parts of the world.

Chapter four, "From Street to Studio: Sourcing the Materials for Art from Urban Life," is, for me, the most engaging and important chapter of the book. It explains the subtle differences in how artists label themselves based on their chosen medium, covers key issues of aesthetics and criticism, and undermines some key assumptions about third-world art and its embrace of found objects. In it, the problem of specificity is immediately presented, especially in terms of how (or indeed whether) to interpret works of art. Found objects and so-called recyclia are signaled by the name récupération, which emerged at the very time the global art world took notice of African art in international exhibitions. Grabski adds that apart from art-world attention, a group of artists at the former École Nationale des Beaux Arts gave impetus to the movement to embrace objects from around the city as an "expressive form du jour" (136). Grabski enters into the process of creativity, a classical philosophical problem tied to questions of agency and cognition. She writes that street markets "are potent sites from which to consider urban visual experience as generative of artistic imagination" (147), and she classifies this as "thinking with and about objects" (146)—which inverts the normal reading of readymade art as undermining the notion of an artist as expressive or intentional. The...