Ethnic Envy and Other Aggressions in the Contemporary “Global” Art Complex

This article looks at Okui Enwezor’s theory of countering the art world’s “Westernisms” and his actualization of this theory in his organization of Documenta11 to mount an argument against the universalizing and Eurocentric conception of “global” art. It offers two examples of recent hybrid art/curatorial work in Los Angeles—the 2019 David Hammons show at Hauser and Wirth and the Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s arts activism—to argue for an extension of Enwezor’s model via activist and aesthetic interventions into specific sites and art spaces.