"Primitive Fakes," "Tourist Art," and the Ideology of Authenticity Author(s): Larry Shiner Source: The Journal of Aesthetics

and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Spring, 1994), pp. 225-234 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431169 . Accessed: 22/02/2014 07:18
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Wiley and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

LARRY SHINER

"PrimitiveFakes," "TouristArt," and the Ideology of Authenticity

Over the last decades, a numberof writershave exposed the complex ideology behind our constructionof a largely imaginaryPrimitiveOther upon whom we have projectedeither our fantasies of savagery and sexual license or an idealized vision of an unspoiled humanity.' Traditional treatmentsof Primitive Art have always been a part of this ambivalentdiscourse of the "primitive,"and the best recent discussions of the concept of Primitive Art (Clifford, Price, Torgovnick) are acutely critical of it.2 But if recent writers have mercilessly attacked the concept of the "primitive"in "Primitive Art," some of these same writers have hedged when it comes to "Art." Wolfgang Haberland puts it bluntly: "Our main obligation ... is to convince art historians that the art of aboriginal North American peoples is 'Art with a capital A.'"3 Sally Price complains that it should not be only the Westerner'seye by which "an ethnographic object is elevated to the status of art."4 Even MarianaTorgovnick, who is more aware of the problematiccharacter of the modern concept of Art, insists that "any challenge to the designationof 'art' for African, Oceanic, and Native American pieces ... flirts dangerously with modes of thought that made the appropriationof land from primitive peoples possible."5 What seems to be going on in this recent literatureis a play on two levels of meaning for terms like "art," "artist," and "aesthetic." On one level, which we might call the generic and which reflects Europeanusage up to the eighteenth century, "art" means any skilled handicraft, "artist"means any skilled maker of an artifact, and "taste"means any set of values for rankingartifacts.On anotherlevel, that of modem aestheticdiscourse,"Art"suggests a distinct

realmof works or performancesof elevated status, "Artist"implies innovation, individualism, and a devotion to Art as a vocation, and "Aesthetic" suggests disinterested appreciation.Of course, this modern discourse which opposes Fine Art to craft, the Artist to the artisan, and Aesthetic to theoretical and practical knowledge has not displaced the older concept of art as a "craft skill." As a result, contemporary writers can play on the ambiguity of the term "art," emphasizing now the one concept, now the other, in order to persuade us that there is such a thing as "PrimitiveArt" (or "Traditional Art," as some call it in an effort to be more politically correct). Richard Anderson's Calliope's Sisters: A ComparativeStudy of Philosophies of Art is a particularlytelling example of the exploitation of this ambiguity.He claims to be inductively constructing an "open definition" of art by accepting as art anything that a people values for either its skill or its beauty or its nonutility.6Such a procedureobviously allows him to lump a selection of artifacts of small-scale "traditional"societies together with canonical genres of Euro-AmericanArt and call both of them "art."It also allows him to by-pass what others have seen as a crucial conceptual problem with the idea of "Primitive Art": few of these small-scale societies have grouped artifacts or activities on the basis of non-utilityand given them special status as objects for disinterested appreciation. In fact, Anderson, like most other philosophers, art historians, and anthropologiststends to select those artifactsor practices in such societies which match our set of things included within "Art"even thoughno such division exists within those cultures. A State Arts Council representativein Alaska, for

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52:2 Spring 1994

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

226 example, must constantly explain to Alaskan Natives that ivory carving and beadworkcan be supported"as art," but kayak or harpoonmaking cannot. What seems a natural division between art and non-artto Europeansor Americans appearsmerely arbitraryto those not sufAnderson freely admits ficiently acculturated.7 that he applies either the older sense of art as craft skill or the modern aesthetic sense of art, depending on which will help him to maximize the number of societies that, in his words, "have art." Anderson at least has the virtue of being explicit about his double tracking strategy; other writers simply exploit the ambiguity without acknowledgement. The effect of this double trackingis to allow them to describethe practices of small-scale "traditional"societies according to the generic concept of art while telegraphingto the readerthe spiritualand status connotations that go with the modern aesthetic conception. Although motivatedby a desire to be complimentary, I believe this attempt to have it both ways is intellectually confused and politically dubious. Whereas many of these writers have been mercilessly critical of the concept of the "primitive,"most seem in thrall to the modern discourse of Art. Since the selection of which artifacts and activities in small-scale societies to "elevate"to the status of Art seldom corresponds to any similar classification in those societies, writers who accept the modern discourse of Art seem to be stuck with the following alternative:either they must force the arts of other societies into an alien mold of high Art or appear to denigrate them as mere crafts. In order to avoid the negative ethnocentrism of relegating these arts to the status of craft, such writers embrace the positive ethnocentrismof offering these arts the supposed compliment of integrationinto the Euro-Americanidea of Fine Art. But to cut African or Polynesian masks from their costumes, wrench them out of their living context, and enshrine them in Plexiglas cases for our Sunday contemplation does not strike me as necessarily an "elevation,"even if we tardily paste up photographs of someone "dancing" them and a big notice explaining their "tribal"meanings. Nowhere is the failure to criticize the concept of "Art"in PrimitiveArt more revealingthan in the alarm over "fake" Primitive Art and dis-

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism dain for what are called "Tourist"arts. In this preoccupationwith protecting the authentically traditional,the double trackingdiscourseexamined above is put in the service of a kind of aesthetic triage performed on the artifacts of small-scale societies. According to the reigning idea of authenticity,only those artifacts from small-scale societies which are made to serve some ritual or other traditionalpurpose within the society may be classified as Art, whereas artifacts which members of small-scale societies make to be sold for purposes of primarily visual appreciationare scorned as either fakes or touristart. Ironically,it has been the success of the Europeanand Americanelevation of ritual artifactsto the statusof Art that has created the heavy demand and rise in prices which led to the inevitable incidence of "fakes," particularly on the booming African sculpturemarket. The Euro-American ideas of "primitive fakes" and "touristart" show the special chemistry which occurs when the modern concepts of the "primitive"and "art"are put together. What dealers, collectors, and art historians call "authentic"Primitive or TraditionalArt is a piece 1) made by a member of a small-scale society, 2) in the society's traditionalstyle, and 3) intended for a traditionalsocial or religious function.8 In African Art galleries in the U.S., for example, one sometimes finds penciled onto the price tag of a mask not only a designationof tribe and function but also the phrase, "has been danced." The pieces deemed "inauthentic" PrimitiveArt and thereforedemoted to the status of fakes or touristart are those made in a traditionalstyle but intended to be sold on the world art market. These works are usually bought by African "runners"who sell them in turnto dealersin the largercities of Africaor the United States. Since collectorsand art historians usually define "authentic"as "made for ritual use"-and give preferenceto older pieces-the carvers and/or runners will sometimes try to add a patina of use or otherwise "age" the piece.9 What is conceptually interesting about this situationis that carvings not intendedto be as functional Art in our sense butmadeprimarily Primitiveor objects are considered "authentic" Traditional Art, whereascarvings intendedto be Art in our sense, i.e., made to be appreciated solely for their appearance,are called "fakes" and are reduced to the status of mere commer-

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Art," and the Ideology of Authenticity Shiner "PrimitiveFakes," "Tourist cial craft. Thus, in the context of the Primitive Art market, the Art vs. craft distinction undergoes a paradoxicalreversal.The utilitarianartifacts are elevated to the status of Art, and the non-utilitarianartifacts are relegatedto the category of craft. Yetit is not clear thatEuro-Americannotions of forgery and fakery apply to these works. Certainly, the runners and dealers, well aware of the enormous price differentialsbetween an "authentic"piece and a "fake," often deliberately deceive buyers. But anthropologistswho have studied the contemporaryworkshops that carve for the markethave found thatthe carvers themselves will openly and proudly tell you, "we can make it old." The carvers simply see themselves as in the business of carving traditional forms on demand, and since Europeans prefer the look of age and use, the carvers give it to them. I do not see much difference here from what the so-called "traditional"carvers did or still do when they make something on demand for ritualuse by one of their own community.SidneyKasfirhas succinctly summedup the difference between general Euro-American and African attitudestowardmaking artifacts:
Typically the carving profession or any other that results in the construction of artifacts (brasscasting, weaving, pottery-making,etc.) is seen as a form of work, not qualitatively very different from farming, repairing radios, or driving a taxi. This does not mean that it is not "serious"... but that it is viewed matter-of-factlyas aiming to satisfy the requirements set down by patrons.One does whateveris necessary to become a successful practitioners

227

A similar matter-of-factnessexists, or at least once did, in some Native American communities. I am reminded of the story that when Maria Montoya's pots began to be sought by Anglo collectors of Southwest Art, her coworkers, with her blessing, cheerfully signed her name to their own pots until the dealer stopped them. In cultures which do not share our particular fetish for "originality," the notion that a reproductionis a "fake" seems out of place. When a carver (more often it is a runneror dealer) passes something off as older than it is or as having been used in ritual,there is business fraud, but the piece itself is not a "fake" piece of African or Native American

Art in the way a marble carving made in a contemporaryMilan workshop and passed off as an Etruscantomb sculptureis a "fake" piece of Etruscan Art. For the African carvers are simply making the kind of thing for the European collector that their parentsor grandparents or they themselves have made for local use. If runnersand dealersdo not lie aboutthe age and use of these reproductions,the pieces are not usually called "fakes" but are still likely to be dismissed as "inauthentic."Although many dealers, historians, and anthropologiststend to blur the two categories, "fake" and "inauthentic" are logically different. As Joseph Margolis has pointed out, the Euro-Americanconcept of faking or forgery involves an intention to deceive; inauthenticitydoes not. The question of is always historical authenticity/inauthenticity and contextual, a matterof decision and not of discovery." If a dealer claims that an African carving is a hundredyears old and was used in rituals, we can employ various techniques to discover if this is really the case. Should it turn out to have been carved six months ago for sale on the art market, we can say that its age and use have been "faked,"but we have not thereby decided that the piece itself is inauthentic. Nevertheless, it is common practice to attack the authenticity of reproductions or even of original works simply on the basis that they are made for sale. Such works then fall into the category of either "ethnicart" or "touristart." Ethnic art may be defined as artifacts made in traditional style, materials, and technique but intended for a marketwhich is primarilymade up of outsiders (Pueblo pottery, Navajo blankets). Thus, althoughethnic art may be stylistically authentic (traditional) because it is produced to be sold outside the society of origin, its authenticity is always suspect, especially since materials, techniques, or even style may be modified to save time or cost or to please purchasers. Although many critics, historians, and anthropologists have serious reservations about the authenticityof ethnic arts, they have nothing but scorn for so-called "tourist art," which may be defined as artifactsnot only made for sale to outsidersbut made in a style adapted to outsiders(sentimental"Plains Indian"paintings, naturalisticanimal carvings from Alaska or Africa).12Since the line between ethnic art and touristart is easily crossedin practice,many

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

228 people lump everything made to be sold to outsiders under the pejorative, "touristart." Typical of the negative attitudes toward ethnic and tourist arts is Edmund Carpenter'srejection of Inuit carvings done since 1948 when a Canadian governmentagent encouragedthe Inuit to carve naturalisticPolar animals and native subjects. Such art "is now a thing, an object, no longer an act, a ritual."113He compares it to Michelangelo deciding to mass produce "debased Christianaltar pieces, suitably modified to meet Arab taste, to peddle on the wharfs of Venice."'14 Although such attacks on ethnic and tourist arts superficially look like criticism of the colonialist debasement of authentic native traditions,these Europeanand Americancritics are themselves caught in a colonialist mind set. Their idea of authenticityis not merely an ethnocentricreflection of the modern discourse of Fine Art; it is also a piece of ideology, an unintendedjustification of a continuingexploitative power relation. So-called "primitive fakes," along with "touristart," after all, are actually products made in response both to the EuroAmericanidea of Art and to the Euro-American (and Japanese) Art markets. It is no accident that Europeansdid not discover that what they had called "primitiveidols" were really "Primitive Art" until after European political and economic control were well establishedand the process of modernizationand exploitation was irreversiblyin place. As one traditionalcultural practice after another has disappeared from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas under the powerful economic and culturalforces emanating from the so-called "developed" world, Europeans and Americans have become more and more nostalgic for what they imagine was an "authentic"pre-conquest culture. This ideology of authenticityis based on three assumptions: 1) a false view of the nature of authenticity as tradition, 2) the myth of an unspoiled, pre-contact "primitive" or "traditional" culture, 3) the Art/craft distinction and its allied notions of the spiritualityof the artistic vocation and the integrity of stylistic traditions. 1) The closer we look at the assumptions behind the Euro-Americanidea of authenticity as "tradition,"the more suspect it becomes. At the heart of it are three notions: the notion of an unchanging traditional society, and based on that notion, the idea of "traditionalorigin" and

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism "traditionaluse." The notion that "traditional societies" are or were self-contained and unchanging ("withouthistory" in Hegel's term) is simply false, as recentwork on African, Pacific, and Native American history has shown. SubSaharan Africa, for example, was an area of enormous cultural diversity where there was constant exchange of goods and stylistic borrowing among indigenous peoples, especially after Islamic penetration following the eighth centuryand the arrivalof Portuguesetradersin the sixteenth. Today'scarverswho make reproductions which incorporate stylistic features from various African groups or even from European Art traditions are not violating the practices of some mythical self-contained "traditional society" but are carrying on a process of continual culturalexchange. The idea of "traditional origin" as a criterion of authenticityis that the maker works strictly within an inherited local style and technique and for strictly local ritual consumption. This image of "traditionalorigin" is not only false due to the constant culturalexchange just mentioned, but also because some artisans to whom it would be hard to deny the epithet "traditional" also made works for sale to outsiders, including Europeans, as the salt cellars and forks and spoons in Portuguese collections from as early as the seventeenthcentury attest. The anthropologist PaulaBen-Amos has argued for a direct line of descent leading from the ancientBenin carverswho workedin the Kings' compoundsto the presentday "tourist"carving workshopsin Nigeria.15BennettaJules-Rosette has describedhow the women pottersof Lusaka learnedtheir art duringinitiation and made vessels for ceremonialas well as domestic use, but when forced to migrate began making pots for sale.16 Moreover, the typical contemporary workshop turning out so-called "fakes" in Ghana is often run by carvers from a common rural background, some of whom have either been, or been trainedby, so-called "traditional" carvers who worked all their lives within a village setting. If the authenticity criterion of "traditional origin"is vitiatedby ethnocentric prejudices,the criterionof "traditional use" is equally confused since thereare carverswho have workedon both "tribal"commissions and on commissions for dealers, anthropologists, art historians,and mu-

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Art," and the Ideology of Authenticity Fakes," "Tourist Shiner "Primitive seum curators.The anthropologistAdrian Gerbrands,for example, describeshow, after much effort, he finally convinced a Pacific island carver named Talania to overcome his hesitancy to make a ceremonial mask for an outsider. Talania was reluctant not only because the mask was a sacred ritual element, but also because the design and carving technique were a family secret. When the local Chief, who had been paying Talania in kind whenever a new carving was needed, heard about the anthropologist's success, he ordered Talania to carve two more masks which the Chief then sold to the anthropologist.'7As you might expect, anthropologistsand art historianswho succeed in commissioning such masks or other ritual objects seldom call them "fakes" or "inauthentic," even though they pay for them and the But the objects have never been used in ritual!18 use" breaksdown comcriterionof "traditional pletely when we learn that some indigenous groups have actually come to the same contemporary carving workshops that turn out socalled "fakes"to commission carving for use in local rituals.19 But surely,you may be saying, it is one thing to claim that skillfully carved "primitivefakes" may be considered authentic reproductionsor variations, 'but it is quite another to claim authenticity for the kind of ethnic or tourist works sold in curio shops, airports, and now showing up in American shopping malls. I believe many of these items deserve the epithet "authentic"just as surely as other products of small-scale societies and so-called "emerging nations." As Bennetta Jules-Rosettehas shown in her careful study of contemporary African workshops, "touristart" is a crucial element in a complex system of symbolic and economic exchange.The fact thatthe Europeanand American consumersand middlemenparticipatewith African traders and artists in setting the aesthetic standards of touristart is no differentfrom what goes on in the Europeanand AmericanArt worldwherecritics,dealers,collectors,and curators play a similar role. Moreover,the artisans from small-scale societies who produce this art have their own aesthetic standards and take pride in their skill and innovation.
Tourist art contains a special form of expressive symbolism. It is at once a statementabout the iden-

229

tity of the artists and a commentaryon the audience for which it is produced. Through the use of visual metaphors,tourist art representsthe emotions of its makers,the group identityof the artists, and a bridge between cultures.It possesses both decorativemotifs and an undertoneof social commentary.20

The errorof many art historiansand critics is to see these works purely in terms of their deviation from traditionalstylistic norms and uses, ratherthan seeing them as a creative response to the realities of the present culturaland economic situationof these societies.21As Graburn has said about contemporary Inuit carving, "this is tradition;it is as real to the people now as the spiritsof skulls and amuletswere to their ancestors one hundredyears ago."22 2) The second assumptionbehind the ideology of authenticitythat dominatesthe Primitive Art market is the idea that authentic artifacts should come from a world of the unspoiled, pre-contact "natives"who live in anothertime than our own.23Perhapsthe most vivid emblem of this Euro-American yearningfor the pre-contact traditionalsociety are the famous doctored photographsof American Indians by Edward Curtis, who not only traveledabout with Indian costumes and wigs in his trunk but scratched out any telegraph poles or automobiles that strayed onto his negatives.24Curtis's doctored photographsforeshadowed the late twentiethcentury ethnographicfilms of native dance art and music whose subjects were asked to take off their Jimmy Cliff tee-shirts and Timex watches before the cameras startedto roll. The same practiceis followed in the typical contemporary museum display of traditional arts in which a Senufo mask or Tlingit hat, for example, is separatedfrom its costume and context and isolated against a plain background.Even the more enlightened art museums, which now put up photographsof a mask being danced in a ritual, seldom show that these rituals occur in villages where the inhabitantswear Nikes, listen to radios, learn English from a Peace Corps volunteer,and ride a bus to the regional clinic. Moreover, many art museums have de-historicized PrimitiveArt in anotherfashion, since it has been usual to exhibit it either in the same hall or adjacent to prehistoric, Egyptian, and pre-ColumbianArts, even thoughnearly everything from Africaand Oceaniain Americancol-

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

230 lections dates from the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. If African carvers have been faking "dancedArt," Europeanintellectualshave been doing some faking of their own. But doctored photographsand ahistorical "Jewelrycase" exhibits are minorinstancesof fakerycomparedto whose the concept of the unspoiled "primitives" cultureshave been systematicallyreprocessedby and art historiansto exclude any anthropologists signs of culturalmixing. As JamesClifford puts it, the contemporaryreality "of these cultures and artists is suppressedin the process of either constituting authentic, 'traditional' worlds or appreciatingtheir productsin the timeless category of 'Art.'"25 3) But the ideology of authenticity requires more than the idea of the unspoiled, precontact native;it requiresthe basic assumptions of the modem discourseof Fine Art. Obviously, the moderndistinction between Art and craft is crucial to the elevation of ritualobjects to high Art and the demotion of intentionallyproduced artifacts to the status of fakes or craft kitsch. Even the current Euro-Americanwidening of the boundaries of Art to include many things formerly ranked as crafts, such as weaving or quilt making, has merely allowed the appropriation of parallel native textile arts into the Fine Art canon, along with their entry into the museum and the world of coffee table books.26 But there are two other assumptionsof modern aesthetic discourse which specifically underwrite the authenticitycriterionof "tribalorigin/ tribal use." These are: the idea of the artist's spiritual vocation and the idea of style as an integral tradition. According to this pair of ideas, true artists cannot express their vision or the spirit of their people if their work is contaminatedby either non-artistic motives or by foreign stylistic impulses. As soon as impure motives or foreign influences enter in, according to this view, the integrity of the stylistic tradition is broken, and the artist is no longer bringingto expression the pure Spiritof his/her people but is now working heteronomously. Of course, there is a double standardpresent in these assumptions. First, it is assumed that Westernartists have a primarilyspiritualmotivation and do not work for the market,or when they do, it is an aberration. In Europe and America, artists are taughtearly on that ideally they should serve only Art, and they are social-

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism ized to constantly negotiate an ambiguousrelation to fame and money. In most small-scale societies, only a few artists who have migrated to the cities have learnedthis delicate European balancing which allows one to appearto oneself and others as motivated primarilyby devotion to Art. As a result, the small workshops and cooperatives in Africa and elsewhere are more open and direct about their dependence on the market, and these become easy targets for American and Europeancritics. The second aspect of the double standardfor judging the artisans of small-scale societies is that whereas "foreign"influences on European artists are not only admittedbut celebrated,the acceptanceof foreign influences by the artisans of "traditional" societies is taken as a sign that their works are inauthentic. The European artists' incorporationof the stylistic featuresof Japaneseprints or of African sculpture,on the otherhand, has been considereda markof their imaginativeopenness and creative freedom. In the controversialMOMA exhibit of 1984 on "Primitivism in Modem Art," for example, modernists like Picasso were given credit for "discovering"Primitive Art and incorporating its expressive non-objectivity into their own work.27The outstandingEuropeanor American artistis viewed as assimilatingthese outsideelements into an original and organically unified work of Art. But the Africancarverwho experiments with mixing tribalstyles in reproductions or who borrowsfrom Westernnaturalism in socalled touristart is dismissed as a mere craftsman panderingto the commercialmarket. Even the most sophisticated use of the assumptionsof the modern discourse of Fine Art in an effort to salvage the "Art"in "Primitive Art" can fall into the ideological trap of positive ethnocentrism.This is, unfortunately,the case of Arthur Danto's argument in "Artifact and Art": that there is an absolute distinction between Art and artifact(or craft),which exists in so-called primitive societies whether they have the terminologyfor Art or not.28Through an elaborate thought experiment contrasting two imaginary primitive societies which make baskets and pots that are virtually identical, Danto argues that what makes the baskets of the "Basket Folk" and the pots of the "Pot People" Art is the spiritualmeaning invested in them, whereas the pots of the Basket Folk and

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Art," and the Ideology of Authenticity Shiner "PrimitiveFakes," "Tourist the baskets of the Pot People are merely useful and thus are artifacts. If the Basket Folk "had the word," Danto writes,
they would describe baskets as artworks, and their pots as artifacts. The baskets in any case belong to what Hegel has called Absolute Spirit: a realm of being which is that of art, religion and philosophy. The pots are merely part of what, with his genius for phrase, he spoke of as the Prose of the world.29

231

Danto's differentiationof Art and artifact or craft in terms of spiritualmeaning vs. mere utility is no more adequateto the realpracticeof the arts in small-scalesocieties than the ideology of authenticity and, in fact, has a good deal in common with it. One of the reasonsthatthe kinds of works which now fill the PrimitiveArt cases of our art museums used to be seen only in ethnography museums was that anthropologists them primarilyin terms of their reliinterpreted gious and political functions. In a wonderful sleight of hand, Danto now derives the grounds for their being Art from this very religious/ political functioning, arguing that "theirmetaphorical meanings may spring from their uses, absorbedinto a system of beliefs and symbols that constitutea kind of philosophy."30 But isn't the point preciselythat "beliefsand symbolsthat constitutea kind of philosophy"are the sort of thing we referto as a religionor world view, and thatin small-scalesocieties such beliefs are usually integratedwith beliefs and symbolsof political orderand social structure? Since part of the problem with applying our concept of Art to small-scalesocieties is thatthey do not make the kinds of differentiationsamong Art, Religion, Politics, and Economicsthatwe do, it is not clear why the kinds of meaning Danto discusses should be called Art meanings ratherthan religious or political meanings.31 There is also some ratherspecific empirical evidence that goes against Danto's claim that higher order meanings are the signs of an Art vs. craft distinction. In many small-scale societies, artifacts of the kind Danto describes as laden with symbolic meaning lose all interest and power outside their ritual functioning. If carvings were themselves the repositories of spirit,they would not need to be danced to have their power, nor would they so often be put in storage or even abandoned after use. For an

instance where native peoples themselves have understood the difference between what they regard as sacred meaning and power and what we regardas Art meanings, considerthe case of the Zuni war gods, called Ahauuta. As James Cliffordpoints out, the Zuni "vehementlyobject to the display of these figures (terrifyingand of great sacred force) as 'art.'"32 So vehemently, in fact, that under the Native American Freedom of Religion Act the Zuni blocked the sale of an Ahauuta at a prestigious auction house and have forced the Denver Art Museum to returnits Ahauutas. The spirituality which characterizes Art in the modem aesthetic discourse deriving from Romanticism and Idealism is of a different kind than the spirituality which clings to certain works by virtue of their religious function. In modem aesthetic discoursesince the eighteenth century it is the artist-genius who generates meaning and power through the inspired creation of a work which is a self-containedwhole. Abrams has recently traced the beginnings of this sacralizationof the creative act in which traditional theologicaltermswere transferred directlyfrom God to Art, and he has also notedthe rapiditywith which Art became investedwith a quasi-religiousaurain the nineteenthcentury.33 Far from being a universal differentiating mark of Art from artifact or craft, this particular spiritualizingof Art could be seen as part of a more general process of secularization and spiritual reinvestment-a processin which Hegel no doubt played a role. With respect to smallscale societies, this has meant, in George Stocking's words,that "objectsof 'materialcultureswhich in traditionalcontexts often had spiritual value-are respiritualized ... as aestheticobjects, at the same time that they are subjected to the processes of the world art market."34In some ways the nineteenth-centurymissionaries who heaped up "primitiveidols" and burned them showed greater respect for the integrity of the culturesthey were attackingthan the twentiethcentury anthropologists,curators,and philosophers who think they are paying these same cultures a compliment by calling certain of their artifacts "Art." My final objection to Danto's distinction between Art and artifact returnsmore specifically to the question of primitive "fakes" and the disparagementof ethnic and tourist arts. If

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

232 Danto were right about the distinction between Art and artifact and Art and craft, then the usual objections to primitive "fakes" and to ethnic and tourist arts would not only be justistrengthened. fied, they would be immeasurably For Danto's conception picks up the notion of the artist as expressing the spirit of a people and intensifies it. Indeed, he has some very eloquent things to say aboutthe power of Primitive Art. And he is certainly rightin suggesting that the power of these works is not primarilyin their'visuality,and for that reason they may not really belong in our European and American Art museums which are devotedto a distancing visuality.35Unfortunately,the other side of his view of the uniqueness of African Art (which he contraststo GreekArt) comes close to revivvitaling the discrediteddiscourseof "primitive ity." Greek Art is said to find power in reason and embody it in the humanform, but primitive art is describedin terms of "the powers central to human life" which are embodied in "natural metaphors" like breasts and therefore do not need resemblance. "It is the powers that define the forms, and the gift of the artist is to grasp what the powers require in order to be given sensuous expression in a way that we humans can know them."34This strikesme as a Hegelianized version of the idea of the unspoiled primitivewho is in touch with the "powers"of sex and the spirit that rationalized Westerners have lost. Moreover,Danto's descriptionof Art making in small-scale societies is more appropriate to the modern idea of individual inspiration than to the kind of matter-of-factmaking undercommunalconstraintswhich has typified artifactual production in small-scale societies. Although motivated by more general theoretical claims than the collectors and art historians, Danto's position ends up supporting the nostalgia for the unspoiledprimitivewho made Art without intending to and the denigrationof the actualproducersin today's small-scale societies who must negotiate their traditionsin an intertribal and inter-culturalworld as they struggle for economic survival. The varied arts of small-scale societies have all the status and dignity that their own peoples have accordedthem without needing us to "elevate" a selection of them to the level of "Art" and bestow the epithet "Artist"on those who make them while denigrating the majority of

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism their art productionas "fakes" or "touristart" and their makers as mere artisans. In the past, most small-scale societies regardedtheir material cultureas neitherArt nor craft in the modern Europeanmeaning of those terms. Yetthese are also societies in transition, part of modem nation states. Since achieving independence, many of those nation states have given a quasiofficial recognition to the Euro-Americanidea of Art and have continued to fund Art schools or museums patterned on European models even as they have triedto preservetheir cultural heritage from disappearing into an insatiable world Art market. The European distinction between Art and craft and the spiritualization of Art as a high status consumer commodity has penetratedmost of these states and inspired a numberof artists to compete successfully in the internationalArt market. The presence of the Euro-American idea of Art and has also spawnedthe intense productionof "fakes" and "37 Contrary "tourist art. to the widespreadcomplaint that such "inauthentic"work is driving out genuine "Primitive Art" and drawing off the most talentedproducers,it is ratherthe processes of modernization,urbanization,and secularization which are rapidly destroying the context in which the traditionalartifacts were produced. Some kinds of African carving, for example, are already becoming collectors' items for well-to-do Africans. African governments are seeking carvers to reproduce them for nationalmuseums, and the curatorsof these museums often lament the disappearance of "traditional"works as if what were disappearing were not a religious-political materialculture, but Art in the European sense. A good example are the Mbari houses of the Igbo, which only a few decades ago were made as religious gestures to redress a spiritualimbalance. They were not made by artists in the European sense, but by ordinary members of the community who underwentrituals of purification and isolation. Constructedof mud, the houses contained rather naturalistic statues of gods and mortalsof near life size, often brightly painted;but once finished, the houses and their statues were left to decay in the forest as sacrifices. Today, they are hardly made anymore, except by government commission to professional artists who come to the area and constructthem of cement so that they will last! In a

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Shiner "PrimitiveFakes," "Tourist Art," and the Ideology of Authenticity book on Igbo arts, an African curatorjoins an American anthropologistin opining that Perhaps a permanent mbanforesees theday building whenreligious practices, including cyclicalsacrifice, are no longerobserved. At least a pale shadowof theseformerly artistic monuments will remain.38 great Like the Medieval cathedrals of Europe, the Mbari houses have, for the urbanizedAfrican, alreadyceased to be part of the materialculture of religious practice and become Art. Meanwhile, I find it hard not to cheer on the enterprising carvers of so-called "fakes" or "tourist art" who are simply responding to one set of Western prejudices about the "primitive" or "traditional" (exotic rites of blood and sex, timelessness, communalism) and another set aboutArt (romantic-idealist spirituality, uniqueness, stylistic integrity). It would be interesting to compare the attitudes of Europeans and Americans toward "primitive fakes" and "tourist art" to the changing view of things that have traditionally been treated as "craft" or "folk art." The migration of quilts from the craft or folk art category to that of Fine Art, for example, owes much to feminism, but also reflects the general breakdownof the division between materialsor techniques considered to belong to "craft" as opposed to Fine Art. The boom in the folk art market, on the other hand, has generated a series of conceptual problems not unlike those pertaining to "primitivefakes." The curatorof a recent show of Latin American folk art explained in a radio interview that he stays away from people who are considered or consider themselves folk artists and tries to find purely utilitarian objects which he can elevate to the status of Art. Thus, his prize discovery was brightlypainted shoe shine boxes from Bogota where the shoe shine boys decorate genenc wooden shoe shine boxes to attractcustomers. Here again the Europeanor AmericanArt connoisseur scorns the intentional effort to meet our art marketdemand, in orderto bestow (and remain in control of) "authenticity."
LARRY SHINER

233

Philosophy Program StateUniversity Sangamon Springfield, Illinois62794

1. These revisionist critics have also demonstratedthat even anthropologistswho spurnedthe myth of the "primitive" have employed a frameworkof objectification which allows the Other to speak only on our terms. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other:How AnthropologyMakes Its Object (ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1983). James Clifford, The Predicamentof Culture:TwentiethCentury:Ethnography, Literature,and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988). Mariana Torgovnick has also shown important parallels between the myth of the primitive and the patriarchalidea of woman. Gone Primitive:Savage Intellects,ModernLives (University of Chicago Press, 1990). 2. In addition to Clifford and Torgovnick mentioned above, see Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (University of Chicago Press, 1989)7 Richard Anderson, Calliope's Sisters: A ComparativeStudy of Philosophies of Art (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990). 3. Wolfgang Haberland,"Aestheticsin Native American Art," in Edwin L. Wade,ed., The Arts of the North American Indian:NativeTraditionsin Evolution(New York:Hudson Hills Press, 1986), p. 131. 4. Price, PrimitiveArt, p. 68. 5. Torgovnick,Gone Primitive,p. 83. Later,however,she calls for "using African aesthetics to rethink the West's system of art production and circulation," p. 246. 6. Anderson, Calliope's Sisters, pp. 4-7 and 21-25. 7. Suzi Jones, "Artby Fiat: Dilemmas of Cross-cultural Collecting," in John Michael Vlach and Simon J. Bronner, Folk Art and Artworlds (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), p. 244. 8. HenriKamer'sstatement is typical:"anauthenticsculptureis by definitionone executed by an artistbelongingto a traditional village and made for a ritualor otherfunctionand not for money." Cited in Michael Greenhalgh& Vincent Megaw, eds., Art in Society: Studies in Style, Cultureand Aesthetics(New York:St. Martin'sPress, 1978), p. 67. This definitionhas become standard with many Africantradersas well as among Europeanand Americananthropologists and art collectors.As Christopher B. Stiener,who has studiedthe Art marketin the Cote d'lvoire,says, "Influencedlargelyby a Western taxonomy of African art, traders classify the objects they sell into two broad categories:replicas (copie) and authentic (ancien). The first class of objects refers to contemporary workshoppieces carvedfor the exporttrade. The second class of objects refers to those that have been used or thatare owned by people in villages." "TheTradein West African Art," AfricanArts 24:1 (1991):40. 9. Among the best discussions of an actual reproduction workshop is Doran H. Ross and Raphael X. Reichert, "Modem Antiquities:A Study of a Kumase Workshop,"in Doran H. Ross and Timothy F. Garrard, Akan Transformations: Problems in Ghanian Art History (Los Angeles: Museum of CulturalHistory, U.C.L.A.), pp. 82-91. On the runnerssee Nicholas Leman, "Fake Masks," The Atlantic 260:5 (1987): 26-38. 10. Sidney Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity:A Text With a Shadow,"AfricanArts 25:2 (1992): 45. 11.Joseph Margolis, "Art,Forgery,and Authenticity," in Denis Dutton,ed., TheForger's Art:Forgelyand the Philosophy of Art (Universityof California Press, 1983),pp. 153-171. See also J.C.H.King, "Tradition in Native AmericanArt," in Wade, The Arts of the NorthAmericanIndian, pp. 65-92. 12. Grabum's actually distinguishes six varieties of art

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

234
productionin small-scale societies. One of the reasons it is so difficult to come up with a distinction between authentic and inauthenticPrimitiveArt is that the conditions of production are so variedas to defeat any large scale generalization. Nelson H.H. Graburn,"Introduction,"in Ethnic and TouristArts: Cultural Expressionsfrom the Fourth World (University of California Press, 1976). 13. Edmund Carpenter,"The Eskimo Artist," in Charlotte M. Otten, ed., Anthropology and Art: Readings in Cross-Cultural Aesthetics, (University of Texas Press, 1971),p. 166. 14. Edmund Carpenter, "Introduction," in Stephen Guion Williams, In the Middle: The EskimoToday(Boston: David R. Godine) unpaginated. 15. PaulaBen-Amos, "'A la Recherchedu TempsPerdu': On Being an Ebony-Carverin Benin," in Graburn,Ethnic and TouristArts, pp. 320-333. 16. Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Messages of TouristArt: An African Semiotic System in ComparativePerspective(New York:Plenum, 1984), pp. 45-46. 17. Gerbrandsalso tells of anotherworkshopcarving for outsiders run by the son of a deceased famous master carver. Adrian A. Gerbrands,"Talania and Nake, Master from the Kilenge Carverand Apprentice:Two Woodcarvers (Vestern New Britain)," in Michael Greenhalghand Vincent Megaw, eds., Art in Society: Studies in Style, Culture and Aesthetics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), pp. 193-206. 18. As Graburn remarks,"Collectorsor museum curators who reject items as too new or mere junk, often pay high prices for the same items later on." Ethnic and Tourist Arts, p. 14. 19. Jules-Rosette,Messages of TouristArt, p. 38. 20. Jules-Rosette,Messages of TouristArt, pp. 229-230. 21. Jules-Rosette,Messages of TouristArt, p. 233. 22. Graburn,Ethnic and TouristArts, p. 13. The disdain for ethnic and tourist arts is, of course, shared by many African or Native Americanartists who have become active participants in what is now an increasingly global Art world. Although some Native American artists eschew Indian themes and images altogether,others such as Fritz Scholder or Richard Glazer Danay use these images ironically and critically. Danay in particular has produced a marvelous series of works which does not attemptto portray some pristine state of Mohawkexistence but grows out of his real experienceas a Mohawkhigh girdersteel worker, e.g., MohawkHeaddress,1982. Understandably, Danay and other "Indian Modernists," as they are sometimes called, do not want to be relegated to an Art world ghetto as "Indian Artists." But their work along with ethnic and tourist arts forms a continuum. To bestow the honorific "Art"on some and dismiss the other as craft or kitsch is simply to buy into an ideology of the "Primitive"and of "Art"that it is time to dismantle. 23. Fabian, Timeand the Other Fabian'spoint is that we have persistently treated so-called "primitives"as if they were not our contemporariesbut dwelt in some primaltime, as if they had no voices except when answering question-

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism

naires we have designed to find out how things were before "contact." Even if such "unspoiled primitives" ever existed, intercultural contact brings almost immediatechanges, including systematic attempts to mislead the invader, and the appropriationof the invader's tools, materials, and forms. 24. ChristopherLyman, The VanishingRace and Other Illusions: Photographsof Indians by Edward Curtis (New York:Pantheon, 1982). 25. Clifford, Predicamentof Culture,p. 200. Of course, Europeansperform similar operationson the Middle Ages. 26. The arbitrarinessof the shifting European boundaries for what is and is pot "Art"in small-scale societies or "developing"countries is tellingly illustratedby Christopher Steiner's study of the promotionof Baule slingshots to the status of Art by an Italian collector and a dealer in the late 1980s. Christopher B. Steiner,"The Tradein WestAfrican Art," AfricanArts 24 (1991):41-42. 27. There was a lot of other ideological baggage carried by this exposition. See JamesClifford, Predicamentof Culture,pp. 189-214 and Hal Foster, "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modem Art, or White Skin Black Masks," in his Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985). 28. Arthur C. Danto, "Artifactand Art," ART/artifact: AfricanArt in Anthropology Collections (New York:Center for African Art, 1989), p. 23. 29. Danto, "Artifactand'Art," p. 23. 30. Danto, "Artifactand Art," p. 28. 31. Although it would be an exaggerationto say that all the artifacts from small-scale societies which we typically classify as Art have had religious functions, a greatmany of them do, and the Europeanappropriation of them as Art has caused considerablepain and angerwithin the societies that view them religiously. See Edwin L. Wade's discussion of the problems created by the incursion of our Art category on some of the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest in "Straddlingthe CulturalFence," Ethnicand Tourist Arts, pp. 245-246. 32. Clifford, Predicamentof Culture,p. 209. 33. M.H. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (New York: WW Norton, 1989). 34. George W Stocking, ed., Objectsand Others:Essays on Museumsand MaterialCulture(University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 6. 35. Danto, "Artifactand Art," p. 32. 36. Danto, "Artifactand Art," p. 32. 37. For a discussion of the successful "international artists"and the many varieties of "popular"or "urban"art see Susan Vogel, Africa Explores:20th CenturyAfricanArt (New York:Centerfor African Art, 1991).In some areas of Africa, small craft production employs up to 20% of the male population. Jules-Rosette, Messages of TouristArt, p. 24. 38. Herbert M. Cole and Chike C. Anikor, Igbo Arts: Communityand Cosmos (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, 1984), p. 106.

This content downloaded from 147.8.204.164 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 07:18:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions