Art

Abstract

The definition of ‘art’ is extremely complicated. Its meaning has shifted radically, in particular in the last century. Originally, in Latin, it meant ‘craft’, but then for the last few centuries, the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or poetry) were defined in contraposition to craft. In the last century, the rejection of conventional artistic standards has resulted in the paradoxical definition of contemporary art as ‘anti-art’. These changing definitions have been difficult to track for anthropologists. In the nineteenth century, art was not a central focus for anthropology, since it was identified with the fine arts of Western civilisation, and the task of anthropology was to study supposedly ‘primitive peoples’. In the twentieth century, anthropologists rejected evolutionary theory and the idea that only Western civilisation had art, and some anthropological studies of art in non-Western cultures emerged. These studies showed how art objects revealed the complexity of the symbolic worlds of non-Western cultures. In the last few decades, a growing interest in material culture and in experimental research and writing led anthropologists to engage more closely with contemporary art. This work has reflected upon how art work can be seen as a form of social research, and how social research can be transformed by artistic practice and theory.