Sacred Exchanges

Images in Global Context

Robyn Ferrell

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780231504423
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art General

As the international art market globalizes the indigenous image, it changes its identity, status, value, and purpose in local and larger contexts. Focusing on a school of Australian Aboriginal painting that has become popular in the contemporary art world, Robyn Ferrell traces the influence of cultural exchanges on art, the self, and attitudes toward the other.

Aboriginal acrylic painting, produced by indigenous women artists of the Australian Desert, bears a superficial resemblance to abstract expressionism and is often read as such by viewers. Yet to see this art only through a Western lens is to miss its unique ontology, logics of sensation, and rich politics and religion. Ferrell explores the culture that produces these paintings and connects its aesthetic to the brutal environmental and economic realities of its people. From here, she travels to urban locales, observing museums and department stores as they traffic interchangeably in art and commodities.

Ferrell ties the history of these desert works to global acts of genocide and dispossession. Rethinking the value of the artistic image in the global market and different interpretations of the sacred, she considers photojournalism, ecotourism, and other sacred sites of the western subject, investigating the intersection of modern art and postmodern culture. She ultimately challenges the primacy of the "European gaze" and its fascination with sacred cultures, constructing a more balanced intercultural dialogue that deemphasizes the aesthetic of the real championed by western philosophy.

INDEX

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.

AAMU museum for contemporary

Aboriginal Art, 46

Aboriginal art: abstraction and, 17–19, 139, 141–142, 144, 146–149; art history and, 55–56; “carpetbagging” and, 47, 49; colonial history and, 13; color and, 19–21, 23, 25, 26–27; discovery process and, 124; feminism and feminist theory, 96–97, 123–129; law and, 99–105; origins of acrylic painting genre, 27–28, 30–33, 35, 37–43; political demands and, 2; sacredness and, 5; tourist merchandise and, 36; Western worldview and, 62, 64. See also acrylic painting

Aboriginal culture: assimilationist policies and, 49–50, 52; gender and, 76–77, 79; Germaine Greer and, 85–89; housing, 120; living standards and, 46; personal responsibility and, 92–94

Abstract Expressionism, 17, 137, 138, 145–147

abstraction: Aboriginal art and, 15, 16, 17–19; art as a commodity and, 144–149; art theory and, 1, 2; color and, 22–23; “country” and landscape, 101–102; disenchantment and, 137; law and, 121, 123; Mark Rothko, 141–142; origins of acrylic painting genre, 31

acrylic painting, 48; Aboriginal art and, 2–3, 13, 15; color and, 19–20; End of Art theory and, 1; origins of genre, 27–28, 30–33, 35, 37–43; Utopia, Australia, 7, 8

“adequation” principle, 115, 116

Adorno, Theodor W., 137–138, 148

adult education. See art education

advertising images, 64–65

aesthetics: Aboriginal art and, 13, 15, 104–105; customary law and, 109; Dreaming and, 12–13; ethics and, 2; “Real World” and, 3–5; semiotics and, 59–60. See also Western aesthetics

affective movements, 26–27

agriculture, land claims and, 104

altyerrenge (Dreamtime), 8–9

ancestral beings, 12

anthropology, study of, 42–43, 124

apartheid, 116–119, 121, 123

apologies, from Australian government, 84–85, 91

appearance, of art, 146

Armstrong, Agnes, 150

art appreciation, 55, 60, 66, 68

art centers. See community art initiatives

art criticism, 43, 47

art education, 28, 30, 31–32

“art for art’s sake,” 39–40, 52–53

Art Gallery of New Sou...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Photographs
• Writing on Art
• Art
• Culture
• Gender
• Law
• References
• Index
• Series List