Paper short abstract:

Here I will argue from the perspective of an artist what I believe anthropology could do for art, but doesn't.

Paper long abstract:

Here I will argue from the perspective of an artist what I believe anthropology could do for art, but doesn't. I argue firstly that art historians get art history wrong - and by getting it wrong create a problematic legacy for artists - because they cherry-pick specific artists to use as exemplars of genius, their exceptionalism is used to write a progressivist history where one genius begets the next and so on. Anthropologists, by contrast, usually investigate communities, in their entirety; ethnographies do not cherry-pick exemplars on which to extrapolate whole theories of progress, but instead attempt to research relations between people, our ideas, taboos and social structures (etc). Understanding art from this perspective would be valuable for artists, if anthropolgists actually wrote these types of ethnographies. But they don't. Instead they either write as if art is the same as craft. This idea belies a history of art qua art, in which art emerges in the sense that we mean it today, as a practice and way of seeing, emerging with Modernity and only in the eighteenth century. Other anthropologists follow the occlusions established within the history of art and focus only on the type of art and artists shown in biennials and national galleries. I will argue that these can not be understood as communities of artists, but moments of becoming, emergences within global capitalism, to employ phrases from Process Philosophy, not communities per se.