Reverse perspective: Bernard Smith's worldview and the cosmopolitan imagination

Living and working in Australia, and being the first Australian-born professional art historian to work in the academy, is probably enough of an explanation for why Bernard Smith developed a global perspective on European art and an acute awareness of its relationship to imperialism. However Bernard Smith’s world-consciousness is grounded in an earlier era that has little relevance to the current intensification of globalization and the challenges it poses to the discipline. This essay discusses Smith’s approach to globalization within the context of the discipline’s changing world-consciousness since its emergence in the eighteenth century.