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- Title
African Art in Deep Time: De‐race‐ing Aesthetics and De‐racializing Visual Art.
- Authors
NZEGWU, NKIRU
- Abstract
In two essays in the ART/Artifact (1988) exhibition catalog, white American museum curator Susan Vogel and white American philosopher Arthur Danto pronounce that Africans do not distinguish between art and nonart. Although seemingly objective empirical statements, their assertions about Africa and its art are racially based ruminations of a white supremacist worldview. I argue that in theorizing within the category of race they produced racialized aesthetics that commit the Eurocentric fallacy of upholding systemic racist objectives. I argue that (1) their assertions fail to be about African art, but about hegemony and power; (2) as the longest enduring artistic activity of humanity, African art is an important check to racialized aesthetics; (3) art is produced outside the category of race and from a critically conscious awareness of the world; and (4) art bespeaks creativity and presupposes the artistic and moral values of a culture in the manipulation and transformation of physical reality.
- Subjects
AFRICAN art; VOGEL, Susan; DANTO, Arthur Coleman, 1924-2013; AESTHETICS; RACIALIZATION; RACISM in art
- Publication
Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, 2019, Vol 77, Issue 4, p367
- ISSN
0021-8529
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/jaac.12674