World Art

Journal overview

Aims and scope

Art enables people to define their worlds, express themselves, and show their beliefs and values. Making, using and learning from artworks are fundamental to human social life, imagination and sensory engagement. Through art, ideas take physical and tangible form and become available for new forms of seeing, understanding and writing.

World Art is a peer-reviewed journal for scholars, students and art practitioners which considers art across time, place and culture. It aims to bring new insights and analysis to a wider, global audience. The journal promotes experimental and comparative approaches for studying human creativity, past and present. It provides a forum for rethinking artistic and interpretive categories and for addressing cultural translation of art practices, canons and discourses.

World Art aims to:
• Explore what art is for people around the globe

• Encourage contributors to investigate the distribution of art, its dissemination and display; to review notions of centres and peripheries, and to challenge categories like the mainstream and the marginalized

• Welcome contributions that promote inter-cultural, inter-national, inter-practice and inter-disciplinary concerns. It encourages critical reflection at the intersections of theory, method and practice

• Enable new histories to emerge, aiming to complement traditional scholarly narratives and presentations about art

Submissions can take the form of:
• Research articles based on individual or collaborative research
• Visual essays prioritising images with a critical commentary
• Dialogues between scholars and practitioners
• Interventions exploring ideas across cultures, disciplines and practices
• Position papers giving voice to topical themes and debates

Audio and video materials and additional colour images may be included for the online version.
The journal is an English language publication, but submissions in other languages may be considered.

All contributions are single-anonymized peer-reviewed by independent, anonymous expert referees. The Editors are supported by an international Advisory Board.

I find the journal's prospectus to be both innovative and groundbreaking in its approach to the arts.
Mary Jo Arnoldi (Smithsonian Institute, Washington)

World Art is presciently located on the cusp of artistic and academic concerns. It not only straddles but imaginatively scrabbles such boundaries.
Saurabh Dube (Colegio de México)

World Art is an exciting venture. I welcome efforts to overcome the division between art history and art practice.
Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)

I find your journal very exciting.
James Moy (Ontario College of Art and Design)

World Art is an exciting project.
Chris Pinney (University College, London)

World Art is a great idea. There is no current publication approaching its ambitions for geographic spread, historical depth or intellectual rigor. Its intention to provide interdisciplinary, inter-textual and imaginative approaches to the collection, display, conservation and interpretation of visual and material cultures is unparalleled and warmly welcomed.
Henry Schwarz (Georgetown University, Washington D.C.)

Such an approach and such a journal are highly needed. I also subscribe to the insight, that 'creativity is as central to scholarly as to artistic work'. Academic circles neglect or even deny, all too often, the role of creativity/intuition in scholarship.
Paul Vandenbroeck (Interculturalism, Migration and Minority Research Centre, Leuven)

World Art is a journal whose aims I wholeheartedly endorse.
Jonathan Williams (British Museum, London)

Authors can choose to publish gold open access in this journal.

Read the Instructions for Authors for information on how to submit your article.

Read full aims and scope