ABSTRACT
In Britain, anthropological work on art was inspired by Anthony Forge’s writing on Sepik River mens-house painting which forecast much later work in cognitive anthropology. In an emerging post-colonial world, the self-critical historical investigation of the history of ethnographic collections has dominated anthropological work on art over the decades. Alfred Gell’s posthumously published Art and Agency constitutes a watershed in the anthropology of art as it breaks not just with the legacy of semiotic analysis, but with the lasting assumption that the anthropology of art concerns itself with the ‘non-western’ system of art appreciation. Gell was relatively uninterested in the questions raised by art world institutions, believing instead that the anthropology of art should address the workings of art in general. Artworks that exist as intellectual property are by their very nature readily transmittable, even portable in a more or less tangible sense.
