ABSTRACT
Marketing Indigenous culture as art has to be seen as a moral act. Art is a value-creating process: it involves both the creation of new kinds of values in objects and the increase of their value in terms of exchange. Phenomenological analyses of Aboriginal art emphasise the ways in which art mediates people's experience of world and enables them to see their lives as acting out the ancestral past. Sociological analyses have an overlapping focus but have tended to emphasise more embeddedness of art in social relations. The marketing of Aboriginal art involves its movement from one context of production and consumption to another. Aboriginal people have been involved in discourse over art with outsiders long before European invasion. Aboriginal people, far from being passive victims in this process, were active agents. The process of acceptance happens as part of a process of transformation and metamorphosis, not only in the Aboriginal artefact, but in the ongoing Euro-American category of 'art'.
