Epilogue

The epilogue reviews the book's central contributions. It outlines the forces that prompted art biennials to become the dominant exhibition form at the end of the twentieth century, it situates this phenomenon of expansion amid the ideological clashes of the end of the Cold War, and it delineates the ways in which early-boom art biennials contributed to present curatorial paradigms. Finally, this chapter contends that the many biennial conversions of the early biennial boom helped produce “global contemporary art,” a category that consists of art made within the relations of production of a globally oriented end-of-the-century capitalism.