African Art as a Question Mark

Extract

What I would like to present is a broad theoretical framework which could account for the significance of present-day African culture, particularly of African art, as a result of a process of “aesthetization.” I use this concept in the precise sense defined and illustrated by J. Baudrillard (1972) in his Pour une Critique de l'Economie politique du Signe. As a preliminary to the analysis of this concept, I would emphasize F. Fanon's (1967) statement about the ethnocentrism of European culture: “the unilaterally decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves our careful attention. One of the paradoxes immediately encountered is the rebound of egocentric, sociocentric definitions.”

African culture, and more visibly African art, are historical products of a complex process: the metamorphosis of concrete realities into abstract categories and, complementarily, the possible transformation of those realities into cultural objects with a financial value. In other words, African realities become, within anthropological frameworks, objects of knowledge; they are understood, classified, and defined as cultural signs from the perspective of the Western cultural and epistemological tradition. Subsequently, according to the socio-cultural rules of this new perspective and its matrix of cultural values or, more generally, from what is considered as a general and universal set of cultural values, some of these realities are given a financial value and, thus, become part of an economic process.