Art and the Global Economy analyzes major changes in the global art world that have emerged in the last twenty years including structural shifts in the global art market; the proliferation of international art fairs, biennials and blockbuster exhibitions; and the internationalization of the scope of contemporary art. John Zarobell explores the economic and social transformations in the cultural sphere, the results of greater access to information about art, exhibitions, and markets around the world, as well as the increasing interpenetration of formerly distinct geographical domains. By considering a variety of locations-both long-standing art capitals and up-and-coming centers of the future-Art and the Global Economy facilitates a deeper understanding of how globalization affects the domain of the visual arts in the twenty-first century. With contributions by Lucia Cantero, Mariana David, Valentin Diaconov, Kai Lossgott, Grace Murray, Chhoti Rao, Emma Rogers and Michelle Wong.

Art and the Global Economy analyzes major changes in the global art world that have emerged in the last twenty years including structural shifts in the global art market; the proliferation of international art fairs, biennials and blockbuster exhibitions; and the internationalization of the scope of contemporary art. John Zarobell explores the economic and social transformations in the cultural sphere, the results of greater access to information about art, exhibitions, and markets around the world, as well as the increasing interpenetration of formerly distinct geographical domains. By considering a variety of locations-both long-standing art capitals and up-and-coming centers of the future-Art and the Global Economy facilitates a deeper understanding of how globalization affects the domain of the visual arts in the twenty-first century. With contributions by Lucia Cantero, Mariana David, Valentin Diaconov, Kai Lossgott, Grace Murray, Chhoti Rao, Emma Rogers and Michelle Wong.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) has attained lasting fame for paintings and prints--above all The Scream-- that express the isolation and anxieties of the modern condition. Recently, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired a large Munch painting, Mermaid, little known outside a small circle of experts because it had never been displayed in museums or galleries. To introduce this important work to the public, the Museum has organized an exhibition that presents Mermaid alongside related paintings, drawings, and prints.

Edvard Munch's Mermaid, which accompanies the exhibition, provides the first comprehensive discussion of the painting's history and significance. The Norwegian industrialist and collector Axel Heiberg commissioned Mermaid from Munch in 1896, when the artist was living in Paris, absorbing the city's intellectual life, expanding his work as a printmaker, and extending his activities to new realms, such as designing the theater sets and program for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt.

The first two essays in this book from the Philadelphia Museum of Art situate Mermaid, Munch's first decorative painting, within the rich ferment of this period in his life. The painting's Norwegian imagery, Symbolist ethos, and Art Nouveau influences are explored even as its relationship to Munch's printmaking of 1896-97 and other artistic activities is elucidated. Mermaid was removed from Heiberg's house in 1938 and was converted by a restorer from a trapezoidal format to a standard rectangle. The final essay discusses the changes to the painting in light of Munch's highly personal and complex views on the alteration of his works.

Edvard Munch's Mermaid reproduces all the prints, drawings, and paintings in the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, September 24-December 31, 2005.

Emerging in the realm of popular entertainment, Jean-Charles Langlois's Panorama of Algiers (1833) drew an audience in much the same way that the arcades drew consumers. Just as the consumption of material goods never fully satiates the consumer, the landscape of Algiers, as represented in Langlois's panorama, kept the French coming back for more. This monumental painting--the result of Colonel Langlois's involvement in the 1830 siege of Algiers--offered a French audience a spectacle of the furthest reaches of the French empire. To witness Langlois's paintings and other representations of colonial landscapes that followed was to perceive the endless diversity of the ever-expanding French colonies.

Marrying an investigation of the imperial context with close analysis of French images of nineteenth-century Algiers, Empire of Landscape offers a new position on visual culture and the social history of art. John Zarobell not only considers the way paintings, photographs, prints, maps, and panoramas of the unpopulated Algerian landscape were tied to the social and political developments of their time, but also argues that the images themselves produced historical transformations of place, space, and perception that continue to affect us today. Empire of Landscape offers a unique basis for understanding the intersections among colonialism and the colonized, geography, place, politics, and the resonating propagandistic impact that images of landscape had in the nineteenth-century French colonial world and beyond.