ABSTRACT
Comparison will be considered in this chapter as the condition par excellence for an anthropology of art. The approach is based on three aspects that underlie the perception of non-Western art, both traditional and contemporary, and which may serve as a basis for comparison. First, scholars applied the notion of ‘art’ to objects that had formerly not been considered under that label, and transposed the methodology of Western art history onto the study of traditional non-Western art. Second, at the turn of the twentieth century, artists not only ‘discovered’ the aesthetic value of objects they could see in ethnographic museums in Paris, Munich or Dresden, but also reflected them in their own works of art. And third, as I discuss below, there is and has been a return movement of interplay with Western modern art in the contemporary art of Africa.1
