Over the past quarter century, artists have made powerful interventions in debates around globalization, addressing various dimensions of cross-border exchange, from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new ways of conceptualizing them. Marcus Verhagen’s Flows and Counterflows: Globalization in Contemporary Art tells the story of those interventions, dwelling in particular on projects that draw out both the dangers and the tangible or imaginable benefits of global exchange.

“Marcus Verhagen is one of the finest art critics writing today, and in these essays he maps the shifting terrain of the global art world with subtle, sceptical intelligence.” —Malcolm Bull, Professor of Art and the History of Ideas, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford

“Flows and Counterflows offers an incisive and highly original account of contemporary art’s mutating relationship to the processes of globalization. In its historical timeliness and critical urgency, it will no doubt become a seminal volume in this field.” —Anthony Downey, Professor of Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East, Birmingham City University

“Verhagen’s complete survey of globalisation—covering how art addresses global markers such as tourism and border control; how the art system itself has been reshaped; and how artists resist by building informal networks—is so packed with well-explained contemporary artworks that the result, in practice, is an indispensable history of art for our times.” —Gilda Williams, Goldsmiths MFA Curating, University of London