Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings

Crafting heritage: artisans and the making of Indigenous heritage in contemporary Taiwan

“…Indigenous artists and artisans have appropriated the International Journal of Heritage Studies 5 rhetoric of Western collectors, connoisseurs, art dealers and museums curators and are now able to speak with competence and authority about the aesthetic, cultural, economic, functional values of their objects. They are full agents in the definition, interpretation and evaluation (also economic) of their work (see Myers 1995). Indigenous artists and artisans, as shown in the case of Taiwan, are also increasingly preoccupied with the construction, interpretation and evaluation of their work as heritage.…”

The Rhetorics of Urban Aboriginal Place-Making: Studying Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Relationship Building in the Intercultural Speaking Event

“…Anthropologists such as Fred Myers (1991Myers ( , 1994Myers ( , 2013 and James Clifford (1988) have done quite significant work in drawing attention to what Myers calls "the rules of the production and reception" of cultural difference as it concerns the art world and museum curation (Myers 1994:679). Here sociolinguistic work can play an important role extending and deepening this work, establishing the rules of the production and reception of cultural difference as they are realized in the public talk, the most recent iteration of a tradition of staging Aboriginal culture for non-Aboriginal consumption.…”

‘Primitivism’, Anthropology, and the Category of ‘Primitive Art’

“…The tropes of 'primitive art' continued to exercise considerable rhetorical power towards the end of the twentieth century, as demonstrated by the much publicized Parisian exhibition 'Les Magiciens de la terre' (see Buchloh 1989), by the continuing boom in the sale of 'genuine' African art that has not been in touch with the contaminating hand of the West or the market (Steiner 1994), and by the critical responses to Aboriginal acrylic painting (Myers 1991(Myers , 2002.…”

“…In the responses to the exhibition of Aboriginal art at the Asia Society, I found (Myers 1991) that several evaluations suggested that the acrylics offer a glimpse of the spiritual wholeness lost, variously, to 'Western art', to 'Western man', or to 'modernity'. The well known Australian art critic Robert Hughes indulged precisely in the form of nostalgic primitivism, praising the exhibition lavishly in Time magazine and drawing precisely on this opposition:…”