The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 107

Map of the World is part of a series of map-based works that reflects Boetti's long-term preoccupation with systems and classifications applied to the natural world. Using flags to mark geopolitical boundaries on standard world maps, the artist created a kind of symbolic code that highlights the discrepancies in scale between countries and the oversimplification that results when a heterogeneous population is defined by its government — thereby calling into question global power imbalances and the validity of national identity. In addition, by basing his designs on mass-produced maps and commissioning Afghan embroiderers to execute them, Boetti undermined established notions of authorship and the separation between art and craft. He said, "For these works, I made nothing, selected nothing in the sense that the world is made the way it is and I have not drawn it; the flags are those that exist anyway, I did not draw them; all in all, I have made absolutely nothing."

This work is the last in Boetti's map series, and the only one in which oceans are depicted in black thread, not blue. The top and bottom borders provide details about the makers of the work and the date and place of manufacture. The left and right borders feature excerpts from classical Farsi poems; the left extols the benefits of knowledge and the right promotes the idea of universal humanity.

Robert Storr, Mapping, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994, p. 15

Geography was at the heart of Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti's personal and aesthetic concerns. Something of a vagabond, Boetti traveled to Afghanistan in 1970 and there made contact with local artisans, whom he commissioned to execute his conceptual designs in embroidered fabrics....Boetti's maps, which vary in size but are consistent in layout, are...catalogues of a sort. Surrounded by a uniform oceanic blue background are spread silhouetted continents, each of which is divided into its component countries, represented by flags cropped to fit their boundaries. Graphically, these maps are activated by the stress between the flags' alternately implosive and explosive designs and the breadth or density of the particular territories they stand for. (Conflating the two primary ways of representing the nation–state, its emblem and its countour, Boetti combined the devices separately dealt with by Jasper Johns in his map and flag works.) Resorting to tourist-trade craft, Boetti thus created philosophical souvenirs of global consolidation and countervailing nationalist separatism. Results of that dynamic already date them: the red banner of the Sovient Union no longer extends from Europe to Asia, and not a few small countries have fractured into yet smaller entities. Mappa del mondo (1989) is also, in retrospect, a memento mori. The last of the series, and unique among them, its background is black instead of blue.