1.1. The “Oriental realm” represented the spirit in a less developed stage, lacking the self-awareness realized in full by contemporary Europe. (Pg 24
1.2. As Europeans became acquainted with Asia, the “Orient” provided civilizations against which they could define their own culture. Asian artefacts became recognized as art of a kind.
1.3. Orientalism and power: When will we stop stereotyping people? | A-Z of ISMs Episode 15 - BBC Ideas
2. Primitive Art
2.1. Peoples without powerful rulers or elites to unite them sought security in their own local communities, which were self-governing and often divided from each other by feuding over local disputes (Pg 31)
2.2. European colonizers of small societies imagined them as the primitive antecedents of their own society and used their artefacts to theorize the evolution and diffusion of culture around the world.
3. Prehistoric Art
3.1. One such theory, developed in the late nineteenth century, revived ancient Greek ideas to propose that society was originally “matriarchal;” that is, governed by women, whose mysterious powers of reproduction were honored in the worship of a mother-goddess. (Pg 39
3.2. While exploring the wider world, Europeans were also extending their own history into “prehistory,” defining early stages of human development and speculating about artefacts from undocumented antiquity.
4. The Orgins of Art
4.1. The development of museums, connoisseurship, and Western concepts of art can be seen as a manifestation of a Western culture of collecting, which Russell Belk has described as a product of “the materialistic consumption ethos of a consumer society” (1995:64), in which value depends upon scarcity. (Pg 15)
4.2. The Western idea of art was constructed during the past five hundred years, while Europeans were exploring the world and developing their claim to be at the apex of human civilization.
5. Classical Art
5.1. The further we go back in history, the more definite but also the more strange are the aims which art was supposed to serve (Pg 20)
5.2. European claims to cultural superiority emphasized an intellectual and artistic heritage from the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. Antiquities with biblical associations were compared unfavorably with “Classical” art values, which became the measure for Eurocentric histories of art.
