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Post-Enlightenment notions of culture, which have been naturalized
in the West for centuries, require that art be autonomously
beautiful, universal, and devoid of any practical purpose. The
authors of this multidisciplinary volume seek to complicate this
understanding of art by examining art objects from across Asia with
attention to their functional, ritual, and everyday contexts. From
tea bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony to television
broadcasts of Japanese puppet theater; from Indian wedding chamber
paintings to art looted by the British army from the Chinese
emperor's palace; from the adventures of a Balinese magical dagger
to the political functions of classical Khmer images - the authors
challenge prevailing notions of artistic value by introducing new
ways of thinking about culture. The chapters consider art objects
as they are involved in the world: how they operate and are
experienced in specific sites, collections, rituals, performances,
political and religious events and imagination, and in individual
peoples' lives; how they move from one context to another and
change meaning and value in the process (for example, when they are
collected, traded, and looted or when their images appear in art
history textbooks); how their memories and pasts are or are not
part of their meaning and experience. Rather than lead to a single
universalizing definition of art, the essays offer multiple,
divergent, and case-specific answers to the question ""What is the
use of art?"" and argue for the need to study art as it is used and
experienced.
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