Much of what is today called art was not made as art. This is the case not only with regard to early European artifacts and monuments, but also with regard to objects made outside the West in places where the concept of art traditionally has not been recognized. Not infrequently (although less frequently than in the past), many of the objects from outside the West that were not made as art are grouped together and called "primitive art." This is so despite the fact that art historians and anthropologists, among others, have been fussing about the term "primitive art" and its synonyms since the middle of the twentieth century.
(1) In 1957, Adrian Gerbrands was one of the first to offer a thorough discussion of what he called "the problem of the name."
(2) Yet his proposed substitute term--non-European art--was also criticized by those in the field. Suggested alternatives--exotic art; traditional art; the art of pre-industrial people; folk or popular art; tribal art; ethnic or ethno-art; ethnographical art; ethnological art; native art; indigenous art; pre-urban art; the art of precivilized people; non-Western art; the indigenous arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas--have all been proposed and critiqued.
(3) Despite decades of discussion, little has been resolved, as was seen in the array of commentary provoked in 1984 by William Rubin''s "Primitivism" exhibition and its companion catalogue.
(4) What interests me in all of this is the fact that discussion, from the 1950s to the present, invariably focuses on the adjective--primitive, exotic, or what have you--rather than the noun, "art." This is the case even when the author acknowledges that "art" is also a difficult term without proper definition and agreed-upon usage.
(5) Thus, it may be time to focus specifically on the term "art" as currently used by scholars writing about the many and varied autochthonous visual cultures of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Such a discussion matters not only to those studying long-ago or faraway places; it concerns all those who employ the term, for what art is seems to be at the very heart of the issue.While all can concur that "art" is an ambiguous term with multifarious and inconsistent meanings, a surprisingly small number of art historians in the so-called AOA fields (Africa, Oceania, Americas), those fields focused on cultures most commonly labeled "primitive," face this problem head on.
(6) Some recent art historians working in the diversre AOA fields skirt the issue by declining to say what art is; they focus instead on what those objects that have been collected and displayed in the West as art do. Dorie Reents-Budet is one of a few exceptions; in her catalogue Painting the Maya Universe, she notes that the "Western recognition of non-Western art is vulnerable to historical events, education, and sociocultural fashion."
(7) Outside the AOA area, Donald Preziosi has asked "whether our own modernist conceptions of art make much sense beyond our own spatiotemporal or socio-cultural horizons"; he answers his rhetorical query largely in the negative and points out that the discipline of art history, with its indistinct boundaries, has no clearly defined, coherent domain of study.
(8) Despite his reservations, the assumption that art is a universal that can and perhaps should be found in every society in every historical period pervades the discipline. Although people everywhere sometimes make aesthetic distinctions between objects and value certain things above other things owing precisely to these aesthetic distinctions, "art" as a special category of things and practices composed of subcategories defined variously by medium, function, geographic provenance, value, and so on, is not recognized worldwide. If it were, defining the term "art" would not be such a persistent and vexing problem. The fact that there is no globally acceptable definition of art is the elephant in our disciplinary living room.