About the Author

Caroline A. Jones is professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several books, including Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist and Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"Art has a unique ability to form communities, whether temporary or permanent, by bringing together people from very different backgrounds into a shared space, where differences of perception and worldview are appreciated and actively welcomed. The Global Work of Art presents an exciting, in-depth history of one such community, the art biennial, investigating the considerable potential of this institution and the artworks that have arisen from it. Jones examines the critical, experiential qualities of art with great clarity, along with the 'aesthetics of experience' that the biennial as a globalized exhibition format supports."--Olafur Eliasson

"This is a wide-ranging and ambitious account of the history of biennial-style exhibitions. Displaying Jones's broad knowledge of exhibition history, the history of philosophy, and current theoretical debates, The Global Work of Art covers great ground and should be of interest to art historians, historians of exhibitions, curatorial studies students, and curators. Here is a significant contribution to the study of contemporary art."--Alexander Dumbadze, author of Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere

The Global Work of Art can usefully be treated as part of a growing field within art history that focuses on exhibition history and the curatorial strategies that exhibitions mobilise. . . . Caroline Jones's book is both a considerable contribution to developments and an important intervention in them. It complicates any neat demarcation of the art exhibition as an autonomous object, and refuses any linear history of the art exhibition as a developing form. Some of the most powerful analyses in the book offer a recursive history of both change and continuity in the sensational forms of World's Fairs and biennial culture (a term used loosely to describe regular international art exhibitions rather than just those that occur every two years). -- "New Formations"