ABSTRACT
The incoming African /Asian cultures have provided an opportunity for the development of a new primitivism that goes under the official title of Ethnic Arts. It is commonly believed that African peoples themselves were not aware of the aesthetic qualities of what they were producing and that it was the West which ‘discovered’ these qualities and gave the African ‘objects’ the status of art. The ideas of modern anthropology have made no impact on art historical scholarship, on art criticism, or on Western consciousness in general about the people who have been explicitly primitivized in the past. The idea of the colonial Other as a group of racial stereotypes, with their equivalent cultural stereotypes, has played an important part in the development of primitivism in colonial discourse. The history of universal art was conceived as the history of human progress towards some kind of perfection, and modern art is seen to be the latest phase in its linear continuity.
