1. Oriental Art
1.1. "Traveling writers and painters brought home accounts and images suggestive of a timeless way of life, reminiscent for some of biblical antiquity, of the luxury and decadence of Oriental despots and harems, and abandoned monumental ruins." Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 40). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
1.2. "Although Chinese (and Japanese) pictures were dignified as art by inclusion in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings in the nineteenth century, Chinese collections there and in the Victoria and Albert were dominated by decorative art, particularly ceramics, and even this was not highly regarded." Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 50). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
1.3. "Chinese painters were praised for capturing the essential qualities of their subjects, not through the imitation of visual appearances as in the Western Classical tradition, but through the mastery of techniques, which also represented the essential character of the painter. This derived from a tradition of calligraphy in which the painter was embodied in his brushstrokes, and there was an expectation that master painters were also the calligraphers who painted the accompanying texts." Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 48). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
1.4. A broad classification by Europeans of art and artifacts from Islam, Indian, and Chinese cultures.
2. Primitive Art
2.1. Winter perceived as a sacred time when the spirit world intersects with the living world.
2.2. Clive Bell & the aesthetic hypothesis: art should generate an emotional response.
2.3. Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers
2.3.1. Typology: The belief that you can arrange artifacts and establish evolution of humanity.
2.4. Definitions
2.4.1. Formlines: Primary formline structures, well developed and continuous pattern of main shapes. Often accentuated by secondary elements, complexes, and formalized color usage.
2.4.2. Formalism: A method of interpretation at the end of the 19th century which focused on organic unity, symbols and shapes, and symmetry.
2.4.3. Ethnography: 1861. "A residual category, covering all those cultural traditions that had not produced antiquities then of scholarly interest." Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 17). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
2.4.4. Diffusion: The concept that artistic elements of culture can be transferred from more developed civilizations to less developed civilizations. Attempts by colonialists to take credit for cultural elements of exotic peoples.
3. Prehistoric Art
3.1. "The general conclusion of archaeologists is now that, during the Upper Paleolithic between 35,000 and 10,000 BP, people who were biologically similar to us began making artefacts now recognized as art, including cave paintings, bone and ivory implements, and sculptures." Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 73). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
3.2. "Interpretations of archaeological artefacts are as much cultural and historical products as the artefacts themselves." Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 77). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
3.3. Link: The Life and Times of Sara Baartman: The Hottentot Venus
3.3.1. "The “Willendorf Venus” figurine, discovered in 1909, was the first Paleolithic female figure to attract popular attention and one of those proposed as mother-goddess images. The name Venus derived from a prurient interest in its sexual characteristics, evoking a similar reaction to the “Hottentot Venus,” a woman from South Africa who was exhibited in Europe and died in Paris in 1816. Both were used to represent ideas of primitive sexuality, associated with Africans and lower forms of humanity in contrast with the current puritanical sexual morality of Europe. Prehistorians imputed their own cultural values to the peoples they studied." Burt, Ben. World Art (pp. 74-75). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
4. Meaning
4.1. The explicit meanings and implicit connotations of images can be read and explained by those versed in particular art traditions, such as official and religious iconography. However, visual symbols also seem to communicate more than people can explain in words, raising questions about the level at which we can understand the iconography of unfamiliar cultures. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 97). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
4.2. Stems from the theories of form and structure which were part of the form area. Based upon some of the basic understandings of formalism and the structural approach.
4.3. Symbols & Symbology
4.3.1. Iconography
4.3.1.1. Moche Pot Iconography
4.3.1.1.1. Depictions of "scenes" that tell stories. For the Moche, much of it dealt with sacrifice and ritual but this was based on their understandings of the gods and divine will.
4.3.2. Hidden meanings & interpretations
4.3.2.1. Heraldry and Coats of Arms
4.3.2.1.1. the tradition of graphic emblems that represent the histories and prerogatives of high-status individuals, families, and corporate bodies in Europe. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 98). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
4.3.2.2. Sepik of Papua New Guinea
4.3.2.2.1. Sanctum Houses and Rituals
4.3.3. Explicit Meanings
4.3.3.1. Different types of symbology used the same way by multiple different cultures
4.3.3.2. In the 1960s, Roland Barthes introduced a further distinction between the concepts a sign “denotes” at the obvious level of description, and its “connotation” of other symbolic meanings within the wider cultural system. Barthes used the example of commercial advertising, in which images of commodities are contrived to represent appealing social values. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 98). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
4.3.3.3. Benin Brass Sculptures - Looted by the British during raids
4.3.3.3.1. The people of Benin, having a well-ordered hierarchical society in which everyone, from kings and nobles to commoners in various occupations, knew their place, saw the world as a whole in terms of different realms with their own rulers and laws. As elsewhere in West Africa, animals in history, storytelling, and proverbs acted as metaphors for human characteristics, acting out human situations. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 103). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
5. Performance
5.1. Parades
5.1.1. Uniforms, military heritage - symbols of national pride
5.1.2. Papua New Guinea Highlands
5.1.2.1. Elaborate head dresses, feathers, bright colors, painted faces, shell ornaments
5.2. Costumes & Impersonation
5.2.1. At a basic level, people attire themselves and each other to help them perform their roles in society, enhancing their bodies artistically to communicate who and what they are. Costume is a virtually universal way of distinguishing men from women, and in taking the dominant public roles, men have used the most elaborate ways of differentiating their rank and status. Often the most obvious distinction among women is whether they are sexually mature or married, which is something men seldom have to show. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 112). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
5.2.2. Body Ornamentation
5.2.2.1. According to O’Hanlon, Wahgi bodily adornment and display was understood to reveal the moral state of persons and groups more truly than what they said; hence it was used to bear out their claims to moral standing and was evaluated accordingly. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 116). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
5.2.2.2. Solomon Islands
5.2.2.3. Contrary to Western expectations, color was not important in assessing adornment and display. Red and black had various significances in different situations, but more significant were distinctions between glossy, glowing, or fiery, and dull, dry, flaky, or matte, which judged colored objects by their tone rather than their hue. The value of gloss and shine was associated with the cosmetic use of pig fat, valued as food and crucial to ceremonial exchange, which contrasted with the dull, dry effect of mud used as body paint for mourning. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 117). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
5.2.3. China
5.2.3.1. Hats & adorning stones as symbols of rank along with insignias on clothing, highly developed structure of display of rank and social status
5.3. Seasonal Associations
5.3.1. Winter as the time of spiritual connections, the spirit world intersects with the natural world
5.4. Theatrics
5.4.1. Shadow puppets are a popular form of theatre in Java. There are several kinds of performance based on local versions of Hindu epics, introduced centuries ago from India. Besides the shadow puppets, which appear as silhouettes on a cloth screen, the same characters can be represented by human actors in elaborate costumes and masks and by several other kinds of wooden puppets. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 123). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
6. The Art World
6.1. Banksy Does New York
6.1.1. Graffiti vs. Art
6.1.1.1. Legal
6.1.1.1.1. Private property owners have a right to not have their property defaced
6.1.1.1.2. Something which is created within the confines of private property should, by all rights, belong to the property owner
6.1.1.2. Ethical
6.1.1.2.1. Does adding beauty to an object deface it?
6.1.1.2.2. Do areas which make up the visual spectrum of a public arena really count as private when everyone has to see them? Example - walls on a public street
6.1.2. Who owns "art" created in public spaces?
6.1.2.1. Do people have the right to confiscate and sell art which was created in a public area?
6.2. Ideology
6.2.1. Defined by Western Perspectives
6.3. Collectibles & Brokers
6.3.1. Consumption drives commodity prices
6.3.2. “the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences” Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 167). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
7. The Exotic Primitive
7.1. People have always valued exotic artefacts and traded useful, curious, and prestigious imports from places they know little or nothing about. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 172). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
7.1.1. Despite their contempt for the peoples they were incorporating into their global empires, Europeans were often fascinated by their artefacts. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 174). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
7.2. European artists began to see alternative styles and formal principles in African art that inspired them to widen the spectrum of styles they themselves produced. They created a kind of fetishism of African artistic stylizations. These were empty of any of the meaning, however, as they had nothing to do with the African cultures that developed the styles organically as a part of their history and experiences.
7.2.1. Appreciating the form of a painting or sculpture without considering its content is rather like listening to a song while ignoring the words. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 177). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
7.3. In 1988 the exhibition Art and Artefact, curated by Susan Vogel of the Museum of African Arts in New York, sought to demonstrate how attitudes to African artefacts as art reflected Western rather than African categories. Similar artefacts were displayed in the contrasting modes of the art gallery, the ethnographic or natural history museum, including contextual dioramas, and the private curio collection. The purpose was to make audiences aware of how their responses to the artefacts were conditioned by the usually unacknowledged exhibition policies of museum curators. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 179). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
7.4. Dichotomy of primitivism
7.4.1. Art & artefacts are appreciated for how closely they resemble "local" cultural styles
7.4.2. In reality, they have none of the meaning behind any of those styles
7.5. Even if curators seldom have the funds to purchase on the open market, they provide essential services of identification and authentication, personally and through exhibitions and published catalogs. In return, public museums continue to benefit from the donation of private collections and sponsorship by wealthy collectors. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 181). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
8. Marketing Exotic Art
8.1. Exotic Places & Peoples
8.1.1. Highly sought after "tourist" artifacts that had their own market outside of museum collections
8.1.2. Income for rural societies through tourism and sale of "tourist" artifacts
8.1.3. "Special Access Collectors"
8.1.3.1. middle-class men who worked among the Native Americans in professions such as missionaries, teachers, or government officials. They often built up large collections over the years, including a wide range of artefacts representative of Native life and ritual objects Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 192). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
8.1.4. West African woodcarvings
8.1.5. Nelson Graburn & "Arts of the Fourth World"
8.1.5.1. By “arts of the Fourth World,” Graburn meant the artefacts of colonized minority peoples within countries that might be called First, Second, or Third World. “Ethnic” was a way of avoiding the pejorative “primitive.” Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 194). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
8.1.6. Papua New Guinea - Sepik
8.1.6.1. The carvings that the Iatmul produced and displayed in great quantities for visiting tourist ships were designed according to their experience of Western tastes and expectations, not only as Western-style artefacts such as naturalistic creatures, but also as their own local ritual carvings, interpreted to give the carvers individual competitive advantage in the market. Such carvings also reproduced and reinterpreted the ritual iconography of the traditional religion and cosmology to suit the circumstances of Iatmul integration into national and global society. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 196). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
8.1.6.2. Tourism and especially artefact sales to visitors and, in large quantities, to dealers, provided an important cash income for the Iatmul and gave their artefact traditions renewed value within contemporary society. This contributed to confident new identities—local, regional, and national—through the production of distinctive styles of artefacts, while continuing to give meaningful expression to local cosmological values through carvings that met the market’s criteria of “traditional” art. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 196). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
8.1.7. Zimbabwe
8.1.7.1. Shona Cultural Sculpture
8.2. Commodification of Local Art
8.2.1. Changes to Local Art Styles to fit the global market demand
8.2.1.1. Northwest Coast of North America
8.2.1.1.1. Original styles included forests, animals, sea creatures. Lots of shamanistic stylizations.
8.2.1.1.2. Evolved based on the fur trade, and they took up carvings for items like tobacco pipes. Argellite carvings in particular.
8.2.1.1.3. Native American baskets became a tourist commodity
9. The Global & the Local
9.1. As local consumption of local products has declined with the availability of cheaper and often more useful industrial imports, many artisans rely increasingly on exporting their products to wealthier industrial countries, particularly in Europe and North America. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 224). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9.2. Most people have long accepted their artificial surroundings, public and private, as professionally designed and industrially produced. “Creating” has come to be an advertising slogan synonymous with shopping, and few people actually participate in creating artefacts rather than consuming them. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 224). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9.3. Universal & National Museums vs. Local Museums
9.3.1. National Museums
9.3.1.1. Museums like the British Museum, with global collections, have received demands for the return of artefacts such as the Parthenon and Benin sculptures, and there are innumerable less famous artefacts from around the world that could be claimed on similar grounds. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 225). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9.3.1.2. The argument of the “universal museum,” holding artefacts “in trust for the world,” seeks to transcend such disputes. According to the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor (2004): “World museums of this kind offer us a chance to forge the arguments that can hope to defeat the simplifying brutalities which disfigure politics all round the world. . . . Where else can the world see that it is one?” Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 226). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9.3.1.2.1. The problem with this argument is that the “world as one” is imagined from the viewpoint of the Western owners of the universal museums, who have a vested interest in maintaining the cultural ascendancy claimed in the colonial period. Although adapted to the changing times, this universalism stands accused of legitimating the possession of colonial collections in the face of a growing chorus of claims for repatriation. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 226). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9.3.2. Local Museums & Cultural Centers
9.3.2.1. Arica
9.3.2.1.1. National museums in Black Africa illustrate the limitations of the Western model. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 226). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9.3.2.2. Melanesia
9.3.2.2.1. The Vanuatu Cultural Centre in the capital, Port Vila, has been particularly successful. It grew out of a colonial museum founded in the 1960s and supported after independence in 1980 by an indigenous governing elite concerned to promote local culture in the construction of a national identity. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 228). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9.3.2.3. Cultural centers have benefited not only communities seeking to recover their own remembered traditions, but also those seeking to construct new relationships with the places in which they live. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 231). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9.4. In the process of conquest and colonization, Europeans collected artefacts that are now among the world’s most treasured museum possessions. However, as the heirs or representatives of former owners have gained political influence, some have contested the morality or legality of such acquisitions and made claims on them as their patrimony or heritage. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 225). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
9.5. New Art Communities
9.5.1. Native American Powwows and appreciation of traditional style
9.5.2. As societies around the world become at once more culturally homogenous and socially diverse, people continue to assert their own cultural autonomy through new artistic production. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 237). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
10. Origins of Art
10.1. "In many situations, art and craft can be more or less the same thing. One word derives from Latin, the other from German, and English dictionaries define both in terms of the application of specialized skill. The terms can be used interchangeably of activities from warfare to writing, and of artefacts from sculpture to pottery. Even so, 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. Art in the Western tradition is not simply a matter of artistic qualities, however these are judged, but also a matter of rarity and collectability." Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 20). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
10.2. The relative value of various types of art, and even items of craft, were often influenced more by their “strangeness” to western imperial civilization than by the actual creativity expressed.
10.3. As an initial concept, art was most often simply a subjective category used to organize and describe items of human creation which had no readily apparent utilitarian purpose, such as paintings and sculpture.
10.4. Cultural Anthropology
10.4.1. Most likely to engage with things like the effects of the museum connection to the construction of identity.
10.5. Carl Linnaeus: developed a system of classifying God's creations, which later influenced the classification and hierarchy of artistic expression.
11. Classical Art
11.1. European obsession with ancient Greek art. Defined as one of the artistic "high points" of civilization.
11.2. The Parthenon Marbles: Removed from Greece and exhibited in the British Museum.
11.2.1. Their orientation and position removes much of the meaning.
11.2.2. Greeks consider these cultural history.
11.3. British "Liberation" of Ottoman artifacts. Believed they were "saving" these items from a "savage" culture that was incapable of properly appreciating them.
11.4. Important Biblical Connections: Egypt & Mesopotamia
11.5. Zeitgeist: Spirit of the age, spirit of a culture.
12. Form
12.1. Franz Boas
12.1.1. Boas arrived at a theory of art as the appreciation of humanly created form by demonstrating the importance of basic formal qualities that were influenced by technical processes and enhanced by virtuosity and symbolic associations. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 87). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
12.2. Northwest Coast Art
12.2.1. Formlines
12.2.1.1. Continuous patterns with primary shapes and secondary complexes - use of geometry
12.2.2. The rich artistic traditions of the Native Americans of the Northwest Coast were a particularly valuable field of research. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 85). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
12.2.3. In using the Northwest Coast art as a case study, Boas distinguished men’s “symbolic” from women’s “formal” art. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 88). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
12.2.4. Structure
12.2.4.1. In the 1960s, the formal qualities of Northwest Coast designs identified by Boas were among the examples used by the influential French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963) to demonstrate structural principles for which he claimed underlying cultural meanings. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 90). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
12.2.4.1.1. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963)
12.3. An early-twentieth-century British exponent of formalism was Clive Bell, who maintained that “ ‘significant form’ is the one quality common to all works of visual art.” What he regarded as significant was the form itself, not its representational content, if any: “certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions” and “All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience—that is to say, they are subjective.” This experience was not the same as viewing natural beauty, nor illustrations that arouse interest and emotion by their content, as photographs can do, for what was represented was irrelevant to the significant form. “Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation” (Bell 1913). Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 86). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
13. Archaeology
13.1. Moche & Nasca Artifacts
13.1.1. The problem with historical sources about Andean culture is that they postdate the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, and for the Nasca and Moche this followed about eight to eleven hundred years of life under other local cultural traditions, the latest being the Inca. Later accounts, including anthropological research from the twentieth century, add a further several hundred years of domination by the even more different Spanish culture. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 131). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
13.1.1.1. Since the 1940s, archaeologists had been excavating burials with costumes and other artefacts which are recognizable on the pots. This eventually led in the 1980s to the identification of individuals in the graves, presumably high-ranking from their association with elaborate artefacts and other less elaborately buried bodies, with particular characters from the pots. Masks covering the faces of these important persons might have served to conceal their individuality, and as such burials recur in different places and times, the implication was that they represented roles in regularly enacted performances such as the Sacrifice Ceremony. Burt, Ben. World Art (pp. 132-133). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
13.1.2. The designs on Nasca pots are often quite difficult to discern, wrapped around circular or spherical vessels. The British Museum project followed the method of the UCLA Moche archive, photographing each pot from several angles, joining the photos together and tracing the design, to produce accurate roll-out images. With an archive of some seventeen hundred pots, the various motifs could be classified, correlated, and compared with the help of a computerized database. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 135). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
13.1.2.1. Relationship of Motifs and Cosmology, beliefs about the nature of the universe
13.2. unless we are careful to specify the social and cultural contexts of our analogies, we risk assuming that our own cultural experience is sufficient to interpret images from other cultures. The history of archaeological studies is full of theories that were later declared ethnocentric and hence mistaken. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 128). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
13.3. Links with Anthropology
13.3.1. societies everywhere organize relationships through birth, mating, and death; distinguish roles in terms of age and gender; share and transmit knowledge; make artefacts; set rules and break them; fight and kill, and so on. We also know that how they do these things varies in ways that can often be predicted by the scale and complexity of social groups and the regional distribution of shared cultural traditions. By making such observations, anthropology has supplied archaeology with examples, models and theories that allow more rigorous analogies to be drawn. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 128). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
13.4. Peru & South Americas
13.4.1. European conquest so devastated the empires of Mexico and the Andes and their cultural traditions, that until the 1960s it was assumed that archaeological discoveries could only be interpreted by art-historical analysis of images. Then, with the gradual deciphering of the glyphs from Maya monuments (drawing on British Museum collections), the names and dates of rulers and historical events began to emerge, revealing political and cosmological meanings that no one had suspected. Researchers began paying more attention to the cultural context of the iconography, drawing upon anthropological approaches, and these insights were applied to the ancient cultures of Peru. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 128). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
13.5. In archaeology, cultures are identified by complexes of artefacts that share a certain formal style. Changes in style in successive layers of cultural remains in the ground allow such styles to be put in a chronological order, as “periods” or “phases.” A period when artefact styles are shared over a range of localities becomes a “horizon,” indicating a time of widespread social integration. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 128). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
14. The Work of Art
14.1. Anthropology & the understanding of art
14.1.1. The idea propounded by the art historian Clive Bell (1913) that art is based on “significant form” makes good sense, once we free ourselves from his ethnocentric definition of what is significant. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 142). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
14.1.2. Nilotic Sudan and the appreciation of cattle, including decoration and ornamentation
14.1.3. Woodcarvings in the Trobriand Islands
14.2. In dealing with what they call art, anthropologists have usually focused on particular issues of formal development and structure, symbolism and communication, and so on, without proposing universal theories of art in society. Those who have attempted to do so have often been too bemused by Western art values to avoid falling back on them. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 141). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
14.3. The "Patterning of Experience"
14.3.1. How we understand the world through patterns, and how art helps negotiate understanding in concepts and social relationships
14.3.1.1. Alfred Gell & the "Agency of Art"
14.3.1.1.1. Technology of enchantment
14.3.1.1.2. Art as a mediator of social relationships
14.3.2. Firth recognized as art the creation of patterns that give meaning to all kinds of human experience, of the mind as well as of the senses. From this point of view, art was present in most, perhaps all, human activity. Just as anthropology recognized long ago that religion played a part in all institutions in society, so Firth made this point by calling religion an art, Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 142). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
14.4. Treating art, in Firth’s terms, as the patterning of culture rather than as a particular kind of cultural activity or product, frees us from the invidious and obstructive Western distinction between “art” and “not art.” Beyond admiring works of art and analyzing their iconography or emotional impact, we can start to appreciate the meaning of art in societies that have little or no art in the Western sense, and to consider anew what art means in those that do. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 143). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
14.5. Cosmological Interpretations
14.5.1. artefacts are particularly effective in helping to make basic cosmological principles visible, significant, and comprehensible to members of their societies of origin and, with interpretation, to others. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 145). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
14.5.2. Australian Aboriginals and the "Dreaming Ancestors"
14.5.2.1. Plant and animal spirits that led the paths upon which people followed for food, trade, and general survival
14.5.2.2. Walibri designs utilizing shapes like lines, circles, and U shapes that represent pathways and objects but also more symbolic things
15. Artistic Colonialism
15.1. Europeans have become experts in the artistic domination of other regions of the world during the last few centuries, but it has been a mutual process between the colonizers and the colonized, albeit on unequal terms. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 204). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
15.1.1. They also pressed this art tradition upon those they colonized, who used it both to accommodate the colonial order and to resist it. But the end of colonial rule has not been the end of artistic hegemony, which continues in the unequal relationships between powerful, well-connected metropolitan centers and peripheral local communities, within and between countries around the world. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 204). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
15.2. North America & the image of the "Noble Savage"
15.2.1. Nineteenth-century painters who toured the American frontier regions made generally sympathetic romantic paintings of Natives and their lifestyles that were widely exhibited and published. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 206). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
15.2.2. Paintings of Edward Curtis
15.2.2.1. Curtis’ photographs capture only a part of American Indian life. They do not show the desperation of Indian people starving after the buffalo were gone, or when rations promised to them in treaties were not delivered. We do not see missionaries preaching in the plazas or on the Plains in his pictures, or medicine men being arrested for performing outlawed ceremonies, or Indian children being hauled off to boarding schools, or the abuse they suffered there. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 207). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
15.3. Australian & New Zealanders as "disappearing cultures"
15.3.1. bystanders left over from the past. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 209). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
15.4. Colonized minorities have ventured into the art world of their colonizers only with the support of brokers who could facilitate access to galleries and markets for exotic variations on Western fine art. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 210). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
15.4.1. The North American "Kiowa Five"
15.4.1.1. They founded what came to be known as the Oklahoma style of Native American painting, developed at Bacone College, which was founded in 1935. The Oklahoma style also influenced Pueblo and Navaho painters in New Mexico, where drawings of ceremonial themes had been commissioned by American ethnologists from the 1920s for documentary interest. A market developed in Santa Fe, and from 1932 painting was taught at the Santa Fe Indian School. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 210). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
15.4.1.2. in the 1910s a number of them took advantage of art classes at a mission school, then at the government Kiowa Agency. Their potential was recognized by the head of the art department of the University of Oklahoma, Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 210). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
15.4.1.3. Although these Native American painters were producing images similar to the book illustrations, cartoons, and other works by American and European artists that were never exhibited in art galleries or reproduced for display, colonial racism would have made it difficult for them to compete for such employment. Instead, they found a prestigious market niche in the art world for Native American themes and styles, supporting their own ambitions to develop nostalgic images of their culture. Burt, Ben. World Art (p. 213). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.