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Calls to include a wider range of art, literature, and ideas in the world's classrooms, libraries, and museums are loud and clear. If so many agree that reforms are needed, why is change so slow?
The answer is the inequality pipeline—the multiple obstacles that ideas and art need to overcome to circulate globally. Most strategies to disrupt the pipeline only increase inclusivity, without fundamentally challenging institutional hierarchies. In Move Over, Mona Lisa, Peggy Levitt reveals, through her conversations with creatives, thinkers, and professionals working in the cultural and academic worlds in Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea, that another approach to combatting global cultural and intellectual inequality is underway.
Like-minded actors outside of traditional cultural centers are creating new nodes of power, and new pathways which connect them, that allow art, books, and ideas to, "travel from Buenos Aires to Mexico City without having to pass through Madrid." They are circumventing traditional powerbrokers and boldly reconfiguring the cultural and intellectual order. Levitt's journey begins where art and literature are first created; then takes us to where they get discovered, circulated, exhibited, and acquired; and concludes where they are researched, published about, and taught. Along the way, we meet visionary artists, out-of-the box writers, committed activists, and teachers striving to define what it means to train truly global citizens. We also discover how the culture and history of the cities they work from influences what they do.
By linking these ideas together, Levitt persuasively demonstrates that what happens in the museum or the library is integrally connected to what happens in institutions of higher learning. With deeply researched, novel insights, ambition, and hope, Move Over, Mona Lisa offers nothing short of a new theory of global cultural and intellectual change.
"Art emerging from outside of the western axis must be read from within its own context. Levitt's decentered cultural globalization lays out how to accomplish this with depth and clarity, employing the interplay of visual and literary cultures to dig deeply into this timely and necessary approach." —Saleh Barakat, owner of Saleh Barakat Gallery and Agial Art Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon
"Centering case studies from Korea, Lebanon, and Argentina, Peggy Levitt distinguishes between soft reform and deep structural change, pairing sharp critique with workable proposals. It's a book that will invite serious debate in museums, universities, publishing houses, and funding room alike." —Joan Weinstein, Director of the Getty Foundation
"Move Over, Mona Lisa provides finely tuned direction that urges us forward. Step by step Peggy Levitt links the commitments and actions she witnesses and celebrates, to a wider context of specific and actionable goals and outcomes. Her work is deeply felt, carefully argued, and inspiring in effect." —Matthew Teitelbaum, former director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
"Intellectual dependency in the context of the social sciences and humanities has been studied for decades, but less analytical work on the phenomenon has been done in the context of art and literary production. Move Over, Mona Lisa helps us understand how this dependency can be overcome, thereby advancing the theory and practice of the decolonization of knowledge." —Syed Farid Alatas, professor of sociology and anthropology, National University of Singapore
"This is the book we have been waiting for. Levitt vividly weaves together the voices and organizational innovations of decentering practitioners worldwide: notably, those cultural pioneers in Argentina, Korea, and Lebanon engaged in disrupting the 'global inequality pipeline.' Move Over, Mona Lisa illustrates how to decolonize in practical, engaged, and performative terms—a rare work that practices what it preaches." —Adrian Favell, director of the Radical Humanities Lab, University College Cork
"Peggy Levitt offers a bracing, globe-spanning rethinking of the cultural pipelines that move art, literature, and ideas, and determine who gets left behind. Equal parts pragmatist and dreamer, she reveals a cultural world already decentered yet still constrained by uneven resources, institutions, and access. This is a smart, generous, and deeply illuminating book that changes how we see global culture." —Clayton Childress, author of Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel
"Beyond assessing global inequalities in the arts, literature and the academy, Peggy Levitt reveals how a decentering ethos drives cultural initiatives in various cities and regions around the world. In the midst of the current geopolitical backlash, she provides us with a rich and compelling account of the alternative cultural world ordering that her book so vividly uncovers." —Johan Heilbron, European Center of Sociology and Political Science
"Peggy Levitt's Move Over, Mona Lisa joins a long-standing conversation about how to decentralize cultural globalization but does this through a meticulous appraisal not just of the cultural products we consume but the fundamental ways in which we are encouraged to see and experience culture in today's world." —Ato Quayson, Jean G. and Morris M. Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Stanford University
"This powerful book and research remind us of how a decentered world of culture had been started to be imagined before it just recently was deeply disrupted. Peggy Levitt offers a hopeful perspective and guides us, along with a variety of voices, on how to continue the path to greater cultural and intellectual equality." —Barbara Plankensteiner, director of Museum am Rothenbaum
"Decrying the ways in which global cultural production was monopolized by a few dominant Western galleries, publishing houses, and other institutions, [Levitt] offers converging hopeful visions for the creation of a more equitable arts world, with a particular focus on underrepresented artists from the Global South. [T]he book's range of examples is impressive instilling infectious enthusiasm for better and more humane systems of culture along the way. [A]n effective balance between heady analysis and human-scaled biography its regular infusions of fresh examples result in a comprehensive, satisfying vision of creativity and corruption at all levels of the arts industry." —Isaac Randel, Foreword
1. The Decentering Ethos
2. The Problem: The Power Has Shifted but Not Enough
3. The Explanation: The Inequality Pipeline of Art, Literature, and Ideas
4. The Context: Cultural Armature and Cultural Policies
5. The Infrastructures That Produce and Disseminate Culture
Talk Back: You Can't Write Global Art Histories without Local Art Histories
—Nadia von Maltzahn
6. The Infrastructures That Discover, Market, and Critique Culture
Talk Back: Book Fairs in Buenos Aires as Alternative Publishing Infrastructures
—Ezequiel Saferstein
7. The Connoisseurs: Becoming a Global Culture Consumer
Talk Back: A Digital Decentering: Online Platforms, NFTs, Generative AI, and Global Connectivity
—Kangsan Lee
8. The Researchers and Reviewers: Organizing, Classifying, and Evaluating Scholarship
9. The Professors: A Look at Global Liberal Arts
10. The Change-Makers: Putting Decentering into Practice
Acknowledgments
Cast of Individual and Institutional Characters
Notes
Bibliography
Index