ABSTRACT
Euro-American intellectual traditions have long designated art as “the visual arts.” This characterization normativizes the prioritization of the act of seeing in art historical interpretation. It casts makers as “visual artists” who intend their work to be primarily apprehended and comprehended visually, just as it creates an expectation in audiences that the chief significance of art is what it looks like. Evaluated against these rubrics, Inka art is often found to be deficient. Scholars frequently describe Inka art through negation, calling it “abstract,” that is, defining it by the absence of representation, and “geometric,” or featuring lines, angles, and planes. To what degree do these assessments miss and misrepresent the nature of Inca art? This chapter considers how Inca art might be reevaluated by demoting the visual and prioritizing a more emically Inka approach to art history.
