ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to recast the question of the relationship between visual anthropology in particular and aesthetics. The technical study of aesthetics has long been thought to be a branch of philosophy that concerned with the analysis and elucidation of beauty, and an adjunct to art history and the parallel exploration of other expressive forms: theatre, literature, dance and more recently, film. If the lessons of anthropological aesthetics have largely been wasted on the Western art world and its historians and theorists, where it perhaps remains is in "alternative" orientation to the future. Returning to the case of Aboriginal acrylic paintings as an example, Fred Myers demonstrates how, as these paintings were absorbed into Western discourses of high art and the Western "art world" and its intense market orientation, a profound encounter occurs between what Myers' terms "different object-ideologies".
