AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Mystique of Connoisseurship2. The Universality Principle3. The Night Side of Man4. Anonymity and Timelessness5. Power Plays6. Objets d'Art and Ethnographic Artifacts7. From Signature to Pedigree8. A Case in PointAfterwordNotesReferences CitedIllustration Credits Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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In this lucid, witty, and forceful book, Shelly Errington argues that Primitive Art was invented as a new type of art object at the beginning of the twentieth century but that now, at the century's end, it has died a double but contradictory death. Authenticity and primitivism, both attacked by cultural critics, have died as concepts. At the same time, the penetration of nation-states, the tourist industry, and transnational corporations into regions that formerly produced these artifacts has severely reduced supplies of "primitive art," bringing about a second "death." Errington argues that the construction of the primitive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and the kinds of objects chosen to exemplify it) must be understood as a product of discourses of progress—from the nineteenth-century European narrative of technological progress, to the twentieth-century narrative of modernism, to the late- twentieth-century narrative of the triumph of the free market. In Part One she charts a provocative argument ranging through the worlds of museums, art theorists, mail-order catalogs, boutiques, tourism, and world events, tracing a loosely historical account of the transformations of meanings of primitive art in this century. In Part Two she explores an eclectic collection of public sites in Mexico and Indonesia—a national museum of anthropology, a cultural theme park, an airport, and a ninth-century Buddhist monument (newly refurbished)—to show how the idea of the primitive can be used in the interests of promoting nationalism and economic development. Errington's dissection of discourses about progress and primitivism in the contemporary world is both a lively introduction to anthropological studies of art institutions and a dramatic new contribution to the growing field of cultural studies.

Published for an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984.

An introduction to the tribal art of the numerous groups of the Indonesian archipelago, as it evolved from the Dong-son culture of northern Vietnam and developed as a result of common beliefs in animism, ancestor worship, and customary law (adat).

Return to the elemental - Search for the primitive - Abstraction and empathy - Picasso and Negro Art - Matisse or Vlaminck - Problems of form - Exchange of techniques - Exotic attraction of distant lands - Primitive art and German Expressionism - Surrealism and the art of the South Sea Islands.