Culture and Art

1. Oriental Art

1.1. Orientalism - "a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience" (Burt, 39).

1.2. "European ignorance of Asian artistic values, at first inevitable but later willful and prejudiced, reflected a sense of cultural superiority appropriate to the building of commercial and political empires" (Burt, 50).

2. Primitive Art

2.1. Historical particularism - a concept attributed to Franz Boas' work that advocates that each culture has its own particular history which causes it to develop in specific, unique ways

2.2. "The idea that before colonialism most African societies were relatively isolated, internally coherent, and highly integrated has been such a powerful paradigm and so fundamental to the West's understanding of Africa that we are obliged to retain it even when we now know that much of it is an oversimplification" (Kasfir 1992).

3. Prehistoric Art

3.1. "foraging societies can have cosmological, ritual, and artistic traditions far more sophisticated than the imaginations of prehistorians" (Burt, 71).

3.2. Processual archaeology focused on using modern peoples that produced similar material culture to understand the technical processes that cause cultural change; and post-processional archaeologists put forth that no one is immune from bias, even scientists (Burt, 73).

4. The Origins of Art

4.1. "...the individual creativity attributed to artists makes an important difference - works of fine art are unique, decorative art is scarce, craft is common and, at the bottom of the scale, most industrial products are ubiquitous" (Burt, 20).

4.2. The British Museum was founded in 1753, which began as a curiosity cabinet and then started to accumulate Western knowledge of cultures from around the world (Burt, 14).

5. Classical Art

5.1. Hellenomania - the European trend of fetishizing ancient Greek art

5.2. "Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas" - Hegel