For Verhagen, these works show that to simply affirm—as the ‘first line of resistance’—those aspects of life that most immediately appear under threat by the temporal and geographical reach of the global market, while lacking any clear analysis of how they are coeval with and thus shaped by that market, is to risk both naturalizing and also moralizing them. It is also to ignore, as Verhagen notes, that many global developments are today parasitic on this ideal of the local, and are in fact powered by a ‘keen and superficial’ preoccupation with it; yet the personal (or private) remains political. Critical art practice will seek to unearth the contradictions inherent within globalization’s processes, rather than resting content with the valorization of its surface-level, highly individualized positive aspects; it will refuse any attempt at escape or utopianization.