Art without frontiers

It was one of those rare occasions in New York when we were dining in. No one seems to eat or entertain at home there, either because the apartments are so small or because there are so many choices out on the street.

One of the guests at the party, while casually tossing the salad, was interrogating me as to my movements. I explained that work brought me to New York at least half a dozen times a year. "Oh, you're a NY-Lon!" she exclaimed.

It was said in a knowing tone. I felt as though she thought my working in more than one place at a time was somehow, well, promiscuous. But she hadn't meant to offend; it's not her own term. A "NY-Lon" is a postmodern art person who shuttles between New York and London, one who can afford never to return telephone calls because everyone assumes he is on the other side of the Atlantic, one whose presence in town astonishes friends so much that they invite him for dinner whenever they catch sight of him.

Being a NY-Lon isn't just an occupational hazard; it's a symptom of the paradox we call culture. On the one hand, we feel the need to travel from place to place, experiencing and consuming stuff, and on the other, it's all the same stuff. We change location, but all around us remains the same.

Globalisation is no longer just a plague of training shoes, cardboard coffee and hamburgers. It's the state of art.

Global thinking comes naturally to some artists - working with multi-national corporations is the secret of their success and their talent lies in their being able to catch the commercial Zeitgeist. Art influences advertising; advertising takes art along with it on a worldwide promotional campaign. And one begins to look exactly like the other. But there's more behind art's new common identity than the power of the pound - or the dollar.

Once upon a time there used to be clear centres of art. In the 19th century, everyone hopped on a boat for Paris, to set up easel in Montmartre, or buy up the latest talents. Art history must have been easy to teach then: the textbook began with Cèzanne, ended with Picasso, and little or no detour complicated the plot.

Paris maintained its artistic dominance until the city fell to the Wehrmacht. After the war the scene shifted to New York. And didn't the artists know it. How self-important those photographs look today of the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and their New York School artistic associates Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who put themselves at the intellectual and cultural heart of it all. Drinking in Greenwich Village (of which there was much) was their act of artistic unity. But to the rest of the world it was a closed party.

It wasn't entirely their fault that their work didn't travel well. I recall Richard Hamilton, father of British Pop Art, telling me that he used to sit in London's ICA with his artist friends in the Fifties, checking out the art magazines from New York. Hungry for news, they would fret for the latest publications, only to be disappointed by the grainy black-and-white reproductions that could not do justice to all that exuberance of paint. They couldn't understand what they saw, and they couldn't afford a plane ticket. So Abstract Expressionism never caught on in Britain.

The cultural traffic started moving again in the late Fifties. American comics made the leap across the Atlantic and British artists copied what they saw. Our own brand of Pop Art was born. This is when the London art world came into its own. Creativity flowed from the Swinging Sixties through to Brit Art, two decades on.

It's no accident that today's most celebrated works share many of the characteristics of Pop Art: it's so transportable. In fact, contemporary art travels too well, and it's paying the price. So much of it is made for export that its feet don't touch the ground.

Its creators are every bit as hard to pin down. To be a London artist now is to rack up the airmiles and make art on a laptop in the departure lounge. No studio with a river view, and no sense of place. As we limber up for another trail of summer biennials, most artists and curators are booking open tickets around the world, with choreographed pit stops at all the right openings. What will they see, except more of the same? With the odd tweak aside, it's often the same show.