Globalization has replaced the future as the site of “utopia”

“A life spent in transit like this is bound up with equal degrees of hope and fear. On the one hand, artists are now given the possibility of evading the pressure of prevailing local tastes in a relatively painless way. Thanks to modern means of communication they can seek out like-minded associates from all over the world instead of having to adjust to the tastes and cultural orientation of their immediate surroundings. This, incidentally, also explains the somewhat de-politicized condition of contemporary art that is so frequently deplored. In former times artists compensated for the lack of response to their work among people of their own culture by projecting their aspirations largely on the future dreaming of political changes that would one day spawn a new and future viewer of their work. Today the utopian impulse has shifted direction: acknowledgement is no longer sought in time, but in space: Globalization has replaced the future as the site of utopia. So, rather than practising avant-garde politics based on the future, we now embrace the politics of travel, migration and nomadic life, paradoxically rekindling the utopian dimension that had ostensibly died out in the era of romantic tourism. This means that as travelers we are now observers, not so much of various local settings, than of our fellow travelers, all caught up in a permanent global journey that has become identical with life in the world city.”
–Boris Groys, “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction“, Art Power, 2008