Wilfried Van Damme

Beauty in Context

This is the first study to survey the field of the anthropology of aesthetics, which during the last few decades has emerged on the cross-roads between anthropology and nonWestern art scholarship. While critically examining the available literature, thereby addressing such basic issues as the existence of aesthetic universals, the author elaborates on a central thesis which concerns the relationship between aesthetic preference and sociocultural ideals. Drawing on empirical data from several African cultures, he demonstrates that varying notions of beauty are inspired by varying sociocultural ideals, thus shedding light on the phenomenon of cultural relativism in aesthetic preference. Emphasizing unity within diversity, the systematic anthropological approach offered in this volume invites the reader to reconsider aesthetic preference from an empirical, crosscultural, and contextual perspective.

World Art Studies

Der Begriff W. A. S. bezeichnet ein multidisziplinares Forschungsprogramm zur visuellen Kunst, die als universell menschliches Phanomen in Raum und Zeit — mit regionalen Entwicklungen und Ausdifferenzierungen — begriffen wird. Das Forschungsfeld der W. A. S. verdankt seine Entstehung mehreren zeitgenossischen Impulsen und Tendenzen, wie dem standig fortschreitenden Prozess der Globalisierung, der Neubewertung der Disziplin Kunstgeschichte in heutigen postkolonialen Zeiten, sowie der umfangreichen zeitgenossischen Kunstproduktion auf der Grundlage einer ebenso grosen Palette lokaler kunstlerischer Traditionen. Zugleich bestatigen neuere prahistorische Funde in Afrika die enge Beziehung zwischen Kunst und Mensch-Sein: Die visuellen Kunste sind moglicherweise so alt wie Homo sapiens selbst und haben sich mit ihm in vielfaltiger Weise uber die ganze Erde verbreitet und entwickelt.

Not What You Expect: The Nineteenth-Century European Reception of Australian Aboriginal Art

ANYONE WHO HAS entered the field of Australian Aboriginal art studies in the last few decades will have encountered the opinion that in the nineteenth century, and indeed well into the twentieth century, Europeans believed that indigenous Australians did not produce anything worthy of the name art. For example, if we consider two of the most recent monographic surveys of Aboriginal art, Wally Caruana writes that in the nineteenth century ‘Aboriginal Australians . . .were regarded as a people without art’, while Howard Morphy observes that ‘The early European history of Aboriginal art is a history of invisibility and denial.’ To give another example, Philip Jones, in the most comprehensive historiography of Aboriginal art studies to date, notes that ‘Ruskin’s famous remark that «there is no art in the whole of Africa, Asia, or America» could equally have applied to European views of Australia.’ More recently, Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis has suggested with respect to nineteenth-century German scholarship particularly that there is no indication that Australian objects were discussed in artistic terms. The observation that Europeans in the past had a low opinion of the artistic quality of Aboriginal visual expression appears unsurprising, since it corresponds well with established views on nineteenth-century Western attitudes towards indigenous Australians and their cultures more generally. These attitudes are commonly held to be biased by both evolutionism and colonialism, which are often analyzed as having worked in tandem. Sociocultural evolutionism, the dominant paradigm in anthropology at the time, especially in Anglo-Saxon circles, postulated that human societies could be classified on a scale ranging from ‘savage’ to ‘civilized’. In this scheme, the hunter-gatherers of Australia and elsewhere in the world were considered to occupy the lowest rung on the ladder of cultural evolution. This was not, or so the argument goes, where one expected to find ‘art’. As for colonialism, the British attempts to settle the continent at the expense of its original inhabitants is routinely construed as accompanied by derogatory views that likewise pictured these inhabitants and their cultures as backward and unsophisticated, as part of the attempt to legitimize the British take-over of Australia. Negative assessments of indigenous Australians’ visual expressions would then have strengthened the image of cultural inferiority that was instrumental in colonialists’ attempts to naturalize their endeavours. Against this background it does come as a surprise that many nineteenth-century European writers made positive commentsIn Aboriginal art studies it is generally assumed that nineteenth-century European writers had a very low opinion of the artistic abilities of indigenous Australians, an opinion reflecting the colonialist and evolutionist views of these early commentators. A closer look at nineteenth-century writings on indigenous Australian visual culture yields a far more complex and nuanced picture, with many authors expressing admiration for the artistic skill and particularly the draughtsmanship of Aboriginal people. In his end-of-the-century book The Beginnings of Art, the German scholar Ernst Grosse collected many such favourable evaluations and added his own, resulting in the presentation of indigenous Australians as an artful people who show much talent for vivid mimetic representation especially.

‘Good to think’: the historiography of intercultural art studies

Abstract Although little known to present-day students of art, scholars in the past occasionally set out to examine the visual arts from an intercultural and even a global perspective in space and time. This article discusses various examples of such studies that were published from the sixteenth century onward. It also addresses some of the theoretical problems that arise when examining these previous intercultural investigations of art as intellectual-historical phenomena. It is argued that, while valuable in their own right, such examinations of the past might also prove inspirational to thinking about present-day endeavors in studying art interculturally.Abstract Although little known to present-day students of art, scholars in the past occasionally set out to examine the visual arts from an intercultural and even a global perspective in space and time. This article discusses various examples of such studies that were published from the sixteenth century onward. It also addresses some of the theoretical problems that arise when examining these previous intercultural investigations of art as intellectual-historical phenomena. It is argued that, while valuable in their own right, such examinations of the past might also prove inspirational to thinking about present-day endeavors in studying art interculturally.