Abstract
As the international art market globalizes the indigenous image, it changes its identity, status, value, and purpose in local and larger contexts. Focusing on a school of Australian Aboriginal painting that has become popular in the contemporary art world, the book traces the influence of cultural exchanges on art, the self, and attitudes toward the other. Aboriginal acrylic painting, produced by indigenous women artists of the Australian Desert, bears a superficial resemblance to abstract expressionism and is often read as such by viewers. Yet to see this art only through a Western lens is to miss its unique ontology, logics of sensation, and rich politics and religion. The book explores the culture that produces these paintings and connects their aesthetic to the brutal environmental and economic realities of the painters. From here, it travels to urban locales, observing museums and department stores as they traffic interchangeably in art and commodities. The book ties the history of these desert works to global acts of genocide and dispossession. Rethinking the value of the artistic image in the global market and different interpretations of the sacred, it considers photojournalism, ecotourism, and other sacred sites of the Western subject, investigating the intersection of modern art and postmodern culture. The book ultimately challenges the primacy of the “European gaze” and its fascination with sacred cultures, constructing a more balanced intercultural dialogue that deemphasizes the aesthetic of the real championed by Western philosophy.
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