(20)--V1_10_the art 博物馆学概论.pdfVIP

10 The ArT of AnThropology Questioning Contemporary Art in ethnographic Display Haidy Geismar This chapter explores the dynamic relationship between contemporary art and anthropology from multiple perspectives. In recent volumes specifically investigat- ing the relationship of contemporary art and anthropology, the focus is primarily on the capacities of both art and anthropology to represent social worlds,1 and there is surprisingly little discussion of the border zones and aesthetic frames that define contemporary art as a specific material genre and institutionalized practice.2 The term “contemporary art” refers, most broadly, to art of the present. However, in its actual usage the term encodes many assumptions about practices by specific people who make specific things in particular places and spaces. Unless such works were displayed in a contemporary art gallery or written about by leading art critics in mainstream art publications or websites, it is unlikely that the sketches of the Women’s Institute Saturday afternoon life drawing class, for example, or the finger paintings of nursery school children would be defined as contemporary art. However, alongside an “art world” understanding of contem- porary art (Danto 1964; Becker 1984; Danto 1988) there is a healthy body of literature within the anthropology of art that insists on thinking through art in terms of particular kinds of formal qualities and effects (Forge 1973; Gell 1998; Layton 2003; Morphy 2007). Anthropologists of art insist on locating these aes- thetic artifacts within their social context, emphasizing how particular forms reso- nate with techniques of display, modes of collecting, and institutional and political frames to define what art is (see, e.g., T. Bennet