Using materials like textile "shreds," cardboard boxes, LCD screens, chili pepper, tea, porcelain shards and wooden crates, Amsterdam based Chinese artist Ni Haifeng creates powerful, poetic installations that examine issues like cultural globalization. In this catalogue, he questions what defines cultural identity--what power art still has--in our globalized world.

This timely volume challenges the narrow Western-centrism of most art historical models. Archaeologists have found that, for tens of thousands of years, all human cultures have shared a desire for visual representation or expression. Yet the study of art history has traditionally focused on Western artworks of the past few centuries. "World Art Studies" examines the phenomenon of art through a broader cultural, global and temporal perspective, bringing together a uniquely exhaustive range of perspectives on art and borrowing approaches from the study of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, anthropology and geography as models--alongside more conventional art historical perspectives. In musicology or linguistics, using such diverse viewpoints for reflection and research is considered part of the normal process. In that spirit, this volume goes beyond abstract models, using case studies to demonstrate and examine specific methods of investigation.

Are the humanities still relevant in the twenty-first century? In the context of pervasive economic liberalism and shrinking budgets, the importance of humanities research for society is increasingly put into question. This volume claims that the humanities do indeed matter by offering empirically grounded critical reflections on contemporary cultural practices, thereby opening up new ways of understanding social life and new directions in humanities scholarship. The contributors argue that the humanities can regain their relevance for society, pose new questions and provide fresh answers, while maintaining their core values: critical reflection, historical consciousness and analytical distance.