With the end of the Second World War the contours and the weighting of the continents and regions of the world map of art shifted massively. The division of Europe, the rise of the USA as a super power, the beginning of the Cold War and the world-wide triumph of Western capitalism did not fail to have an effect on the sphere of art. The rapid and lasting erosion of French hegemony in the art market and of the predominant role of Paris in the production, circulation and consecration of art after the war was accompanied by the equally swift rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, as a result of which New York developed into the leading art metropolis in the course of the 1960s. And to the present day it has maintained this position of power and monopoly, enabling it to determine the canon of what was now called contemporary art. Around the middle of the 1980s an opening of the art world took place which is frequently associated with the transition from the modern to the so-called post-modern age in art and with the dynamics of contemporary art itself. The appearance of young artists from post-colonial contexts at the Paris exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre” in 1989 is an exemplary, ever emblematic sign of the increased inclusion of non-Western actors in an art scene whose mapping had hitherto been almost exclusively restricted to North America and Europe.