ABSTRACT
Museums provide an experience of most of the world’s art and artifacts that does not bear even the remotest resemblance to what their makers intended. African art provides a useful and particularly sharp instance of the distortion produced by exhibiting in museums objects made for quite different purposes. The cultural context of much of the world’s art, particularly that large segment which is religious in inspiration, is remote from the contemporary museum- going public. The exhibition approached the question of perception through individual objects and through installation styles. The exhibition also considered the contexts in which Westerners have seen African art. The museum is teaching - expressly, as part of an education program and an articulated agenda, but also subtly, almost unconsciously – a system of highly political values expressed not only in the style of presentation but in myriad facets of its operation.
