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Modernist as well as post-modernist discourse on art is based on an implicit center-periphery model that repeatedly inscribes the art produced in the West as the dominant core. Ironically, these discourses parallel the rhetoric of modernization adopted by the governments of Third World nations. I propose that theories of modernity articulated in the writings of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, and more recently in the work of Stuart Hall and Arjun Appadurai, broadens narrow perceptions of art production while making available a theoretical framework that subverts the centrality of the western cultural paradigm in discussions of contemporary South Asian art.
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