ArtMarketMonitor.com was founded on a premise that the art world is the arena where the beginnings of a truly global culture is being forged. We’ve pursued that idea through a number of different topics and subjects.

Here author Sarah Thornton, speaking with Globe and Mail, articulates that same idea in her own way. She’s answering a question about what attracted her to the art world:

It is a kind of an epitome of sorts, a world where culture is contested, where it’s status-ridden, where it’s debated. There are a lot of sectors of culture which share that, but in the art world it’s more intense, maybe because there’s more money involved. And I feel like the internationalism, the mix of work and play, are possibly a kind of sign of the shape of social worlds to come.

I think that the art world is more international than other social worlds and that internationalism in general is on the rise and that kind of peculiar blurring of work and play that you get in the art world would also seem to be on the rise and likely to be more the shape of social worlds in the future. So that, and the fact that art is mostly nonverbal, so it crosses more cultural and international boundaries than literature.

Going Native with Billionaire Collectors and Bad-Boy Artists (Globe & Mail)