The World Over purports to be the first international art exhibition to literally span the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, with one half of the exhibition at the City Gallery, Wellington, and the other at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The internet provides another platform, bridging the two exhibition spaces with the visitor able to view the work at the other end of the globe, and acting as a third gallery for artwork commissioned for the World Wide Web.

Subtitling it Art in the Age of Globalisation, curators Wystan Curnow and Dorine Mignot have attempted to grapple with how contemporary art is reflecting a world shrinking due to telecommunications, capitalism, travel etc and beginning to work more as a homogeneous system.

This curatorial grand design comes over as rather vague and woolly on the gallery floor. For the most part the artists plucked from around the world to be in this show appear to be stimulated by the diversity, not the homogeneity, of what they experience.

The question of what the world as a singular system is, or could be, which the essay suggested this show dealt with, remained for me in its envelope. The diverging strands of thought instead made this the artistic equivalent of a world expo, with a heavy lean towards the exhibition's two centres, Holland and New Zealand.

To initiate curatorial consideration of globalisation, New Zealand is perhaps not a good place to start. While this exhibition itself is notable for breaking through geographical barriers, it is jumping the gun in regard to the relative artistic isolation of the country's artists.

Take for example New Zealand's major artistic contribution to the exhibition, Colin McCahon. His long panorama Walk (Beach Walk Series C) is at the City Gallery, and fifteen of his works have taken over the Room of Honour at the Stedelijk. McCahon's work has often been described as 'fundamentally provincial', the artist spending little time overseas, and gaining most of his knowledge through libraries and collections. McCahon's inclusion ends up looking like part of a cultural exchange with Holland, thrown into the exhibition as an afterthought.

Meanwhile, Australian artist Imants Tillers' painting There is Still That Which Cleaves Within the Cleft makes more sense. He combines a German 19th century view of Tasmania and images from Japanese-American artist Arakawa, with the local link of Tillers' initials being rendered large in McCahon's "I Am" style.

The World Over as a show is also weakened by structuring itself around form which alludes to the world as a whole rather than global ideas - the panorama format, globe or sphere shape and the 'information superhighway'.

Oddities abound. A video of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty appears out of time and out of place. It is included as a 'descendant of the panorama', which we are told was the virtual reality of the 19th century. Not only is this link to the panorama a tenuous reason for its inclusion (as it is for the McCahon), but can we really consider the form of the panorama 'a global view'?

Other work runs completely against the grain of the exhibition's theme. Belgian artist Wim Delvoye's superb Concrete Mixer actually highlights the difficulties in cultural translation and global communication, when he gets a concrete mixer made in Indonesia and it turns out to be completely impractical.

There's no doubt the work in this show is of a very high standard. Nonetheless, it's hard to get past the fact that few works actually fit the exhibition's brief. Those that do, such as Matt Mullican's banners, international signs translated into a personal language, and Lee Byras' Is, a minimalist global statement of perfection with a gilded marble sphere, lose their impact as a consequence.

Finally, is it too PC to think that having only two women exhibiting in the gallery in a group of 24 artists (and the odds are little better on the net) is a teeny weeny bit unbalanced?