Can Aboriginal Art Be Contemporary Art?

The Australian wades into a controversy over the current generation of aboriginal artists:

A paper by Melbourne academic Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios says major artists such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Rover Thomas, are promoted as Aboriginal in a way that Pablo Picasso would not be labelled Spanish.

To secure the future of the Aboriginal art market, it needs to expand and evolve so that a new generation of artists is cultivated and they are accepted as contemporary practitioners, she writes. Marketing the first generation of Aboriginal desert painters as the genuine ethnographic article has the corollary effect of initiating a spiral of redundancy that makes it increasingly difficult to promote subsequent generations of Aboriginal artists.

Some dealers disagree in the story pointing to the health of aboriginal art on the primary market. These dealers say that a new generation of Aboriginal artists are taking their place in the Contemporary art market, especially outside of Australia.

Url: http://www.artmarketmonitor.com/2010/09/18/can-aboriginal-art-be-contemporary-art/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss