'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' presents original contributions that deal with artworks of differently marginalized people—such as ethnic minorities, refugees, immigrants, disabled people, and descendants of slaves—, a wide variety of art forms—like clay figures, textile, paintings, poems, museum exhibits and theatre performances—, and original data based on committed, long-term fieldwork and/or archival research in Brazil, Martinique, Rwanda, India, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The volume develops theoretical approaches inspired by innovative theorists and is based on currently debated analytical categories including the ethnographic turn in contemporary art, polycentric aesthetics, and aesthetic cannibalization, among others. This collection also incorporates fascinating and intriguing contemporary cases, but with solid theoretical arguments and grounds. 'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' will appeal to students at all levels, scholars, and practitioners in arts, aesthetics, anthropology, social inequality, and discrimination, as well as researchers in other fields, including post-colonialism and cultural organizations.

When referring to the art of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world, people often think of traditional art forms. Contemporary artists from cultures and countries outside Europe are highly critical of this common Western expectation that non-Western cultures should above all be traditional. The contributors (artists, curators and scientists) try to point out that there's also modern art outside Europe and pay attention to the relationship between the old and the new.

While the importance of the relationship between anthropology and contemporary art has long been recognized, the discussion has tended to be among scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia; until now, scholarship and experiences from other regions have been largely absent from mainstream debate. Alternative Art and Anthropology: Global Encounters rectifies this by offering a ground-breaking new approach to the subject. Entirely dedicated to perspectives from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the book advances our understanding of the connections between anthropology and contemporary art on a global scale. Across ten chapters, a range of anthropologists, artists, and curators from countries such as China, Japan, Indonesia, Bhutan, Nigeria, Chile, Ecuador, and the Philippines discuss encounters between anthropology and contemporary art from their points of view, presenting readers with new vantage points and perspectives. Arnd Schneider, a leading scholar in the field, draws together the various threads to provide readers with a clear conceptual and theoretical narrative. The first to map the relationship between anthropology and contemporary art from a global perspective, this is a key text for students and academics in areas such as anthropology, visual anthropology, anthropology of art, art history, and curatorial studies.

The term outsider art has been used to describe work produced exterior to the mainstream of modern art by certain self-taught visionaries, spiritualists, eccentrics, recluses, psychiatric patients, criminals, and others beyond the perceived margins of society. Yet the idea of such a raw, untaught creativity remains a contentious and much-debated issue in the art world. Is this creative instinct a natural, innate phenomenon, requiring only the right circumstances—such as isolation or alienation—in order for it to be cultivated? Or is it an idealistic notion projected onto the art and artists by critics and buyers? David Maclagan argues that behind the critical and commercial hype lies a cluster of assumptions about creative drives, the expression of inner worlds, originality, and artistic eccentricity. Although outsider art is often presented as a recent discovery, these ideas, Maclagan reveals, belong to a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance, when the modern image of the artist began to take shape. In Outsider Art, Maclagan challenges many of the current opinions about this increasingly popular field of art and explores what happens to outsider artists and their work when they are brought within the very world from which they have excluded themselves.

The art worlds analysis represented in this collection of original studies questions the social arrangements that determine the recruitment and training of artists, the institutional mechanisms that govern distribution and influence success, the processes of innovation within art worlds, and the emergence of new formations around new media or new players. These studies share a focus on borderline cases and questions - on actions, transactions, and transitions at the margins of art worlds.

During the late 1980s, the near-worship of artistic genius produced auction sales of works by Vmcent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso for tens of millions of dollars, over $15 million for a painting by Jasper Johns, and record prices for works by many other deceased and even living masters. At the same time, it was no longer controversial in academic and intellectual circles to maintain that art works are the products of what Howard Becker has termed collective activity carried out within loosely defined art worlds: Works of art, from this point of view, are not the products of individual makers, "artists" who possess a rare and special gift. They are, rather, joint products of all the people who cooperate via an art world's characteristic conventions to bring works like that into existence. Artists are some sub-group of the world's participants who, by common agreement, possess a specialgift, therefore make a unique and indispensable contribution to the work, and thereby make it art. (1982: 35) The concept of the art world-with its central focus on the collective, social, and conventional nature of artistic production, distribution, and appreciation--confronts and potentially undermines the romantic ideology of art and artists still dominant in Western societies.

The story of the experimental zeitgeist in Eastern European art, seen through personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Throughout the 1970s, a network of artists emerged to bridge the East-West divide, and the no less rigid divides between the countries of the Eastern bloc. Originating with a series of creative initiatives by artists, art historians, and critics and centered in places like Budapest, Poznań, and Prague, this experimental dialogue involved Western participation but is today largely forgotten in the West. In Networking the Bloc, Klara Kemp-Welch vividly recaptures this lost chapter of art history, documenting an elaborate web of artistic connectivity that came about through a series of personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Countering the conventional Cold War narrative of Eastern bloc isolation, Kemp-Welch shows how artistic ideas were relayed among like-minded artists across ideological boundaries and national frontiers. Much of the work created was collaborative, and personal encounters were at its heart. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with participants, Kemp-Welch focuses on the exchanges and projects themselves rather than the personalities involved. Each of the projects she examines relied for its realization on a network of contributors. She looks first at the mobilization of the network, from 1964 to 1972, exploring five pioneering cases: a friendship between a Slovak artist and a French critic, an artistic credo, an exhibition, a conceptual proposition, and a book. She then charts a series of way stations for experimental art from the Soviet bloc between 1972 and 1976—points of distribution between studios, private homes, galleries, and certain cities. Finally, she investigates convergences—a succession of shared exhibitions and events in the second half of the 1970s in locations ranging from Prague to Milan to Moscow. Networking the Bloc, Kemp-Welch invites us to rethink the art of the late Cold War period from Eastern European perspectives.