The New Anthropology of Art

Saleem Al-Bahloly (UC Berkeley) and Elizabeth Kelley (UC Berkeley)

What would an anthropology of the modern artwork be? This panel
attempts to re-conceive the anthropology of art as an anthropology of
forms of painting, literature, theater and film that developed within a
particular history in Europe and circulated to non-European countries,
where they had no history but where they enabled the creation of new
means of expression. The proliferation of paintings, novels, plays, and
films in the non-European world was a major characteristic of the
twentieth century; however that work fits neither within a European
history of art nor within an anthropological notion of ‘culture’. How
do we think this creativity? And how do we do so without reducing it to
a European derivative nor reading it as a sociology of its producer?
That is, while still considering it as ‘art’? It might be considered
art, not because we assimilate it to a trans-historical concept of art
as an earlier anthropology of art had done, but because it has a
European genealogy. How, though, in coming to function in historical
circumstances different from those in which they developed, and in
response to specific events, do these art forms exceed that genealogy?
How do we think the institutional forms, such as publishing houses and
galleries, that condition them, the legal regimes that govern them, and
the different politics they elicit? How do we think their circulation
and legibility (or illegibility) in current transnational markets,
where recognition is unequally distributed, some get prizes, published,
profiled in international media, and others don’t? What kind of
thinking might an anthropology of art enable over and against the
anthropology of media and the anthropology of aesthetics?

Papers will present concrete work that examines the displacements and
reconfigurations art forms (painting, literature, performance, film,
video) undergo in their migration from their European origin;
interactions with other aesthetic traditions; questions of authorship
and censorship; the conduits through which certain forms are made
legible and circulate in a global, transnational marketplaces (book
fairs, biennales, etc.).

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to saleemhaberkeley.edu
and lizkelleyberkeley.edu by March 10, 2012.