"Painting Culture" tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied--often as a participant-observer--the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions--the world of dealers, museums, and critics. At the same time, he shows how this change in the status of the acrylic paintings is directly related to the initiative of the painters themselves and their hopes for greater levels of recognition.

"Painting Culture" describes in detail the actual practice of painting, insisting that such a focus is necessary to engage directly with the role of the art in the lives of contemporary Aboriginals. The book includes a unique local art history, a study of the complete corpus of two painters over a two-year period. It also explores the awkward local issues around the valuation and sale of the acrylic paintings, traces the shifting approaches of the Australian government and key organizations such as the Aboriginal Arts Board to the promotion of the work, and describes the early and subsequent phases of the works' inclusion in major Australian and international exhibitions. Myers provides an account of some of the events related to these exhibits, most notably the Asia Society's 1988 "Dreamings" show in New York, which was so pivotal in bringing the work to North American notice. He also traces the approaches and concerns of dealers, ranging from semi-tourist outlets in Alice Springs to more prestigious venues in Sydney and Melbourne.

With its innovative approach to the transnational circulation of culture, this book will appeal to art historians, as well as those in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies, and performance studies.

The essays in this collection signal a relationship between anthropology and the study of art. They explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and their "traffic" in non-Western objects. Starting from the premise that the traditional anthropology of art has been developed within categories and practices of Westem art worlds themselves, this volume develops a new framework for understanding how western art - its avant-gardes, scholars, commentators, and collectors - have appropriated anthropological subjects like the "primitive" and the "exotic other." The success of Australian Aboriginal acrylic paintings in the New York art world prompts Fred Myers to explore the circulation of indigenous art in the international market. Steven Feld looks at the contemporary world beat music scene and the commodification of remote music cultures. Carol Vance takes on the contentious struggles over art, censorship, obscenity, and the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States. George Marcus looks at the meaning of new, oppositional artwork in the context of t

Representing a new wave of thinking about material culture studies-a topic long overdue for reevaluation-the essays in this volume take a fresh look at the relationship between material culture and exchange theory and illuminate the changing patterns of cultural flow in an increasingly global economy and the cultural differences registered in "regimes of value." The Empire of Things includes an extensive interview with the late Annette B.Weiner, whose work on exchange theory still inspires contemporary material culture studies. The contributors deconstruct the traditional opposition between "gift" and "commodity" and between supposedly; "alienable" and "inalienable" objects in ceremonies of exchange-whether on the island of Sumba or among middle-class shoppers in North London. They show how objects can become symbols of national identity, in cases ranging from artworks in Australia to lost body parts of past Mexican presidents. They reveal how the movement of objects through different contexts, across borders, or through art exhibitions exposes contradictions and shifting meanings for different constituencies.

The Pintupi, a hunting-and-gathering people of Australia's Western Desert, were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white society. Despite their extended relocation in central Australian settlements, they have managed to preserve much of their traditional culture and social organization. This book presents a comprehensive ethnographic interpretation of the ways in which Pintupi politics, cosmology, kinship systems, nomadic patterns, and social values reinforce and sometimes contradict each other.