It is a fatalist nightmare whose effects are now being felt throughout the world. Art from the older Western nations, the newly created East Block nations, the Third World and primitive cultures, are all equalized through appropriation into the mainstream market . As the rate of this appropriation increases, the more fragile cultures of smaller nations and regions are flattened out and steamrolled by the central markets of the more powerful nations. The profound depths of intrinsic cultural value are consumed and depleted, to demonstrate that economy is indeed Lord of culture. The power of post-Modernism, the main market's didactic namesake cousin is, like economy, just the packaging that surrounds and obscures the real value that lies within, namely intrinsic culture.
Internationalism is a dilution or distortion of original culture.
The success of some artists is essentially a failing, the subjugation of cultural origins in the face of the devastating effects of global scale economies that parallel a new spirit of conservatism throughout the Western world. This spirit is no less present in the business of Art than it is in the business of Business. In New York, where the spiritual exhaustion of America's own commoditization of art has achieved outrageous proportions, a succession of regional movements has been ingested into the main market. Arte Povera from Italy, which used discarded materials as the basis for its art and was originally a reaction to the rampant elitism of the art world, found itself integrated into the New York market. Then Germany's Neo-expressionists, who had, at the outset, sought to maintain their cultural specificity by avoiding the American market, found themselves devoured in the early '80s.