ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the dynamic between art and anthropology. It explores a number of case studies which hopefully illuminate this relation from a research point of view. Culture is no longer seen as the esoteric pursuit of artists but as the lived experience of everyone. The advent of visual culture as a field of enquiry has moved the study of the visual beyond art history’s traditional concerns painting, sculpture, architecture and design towards an engagement with the domain of popular culture and the media. The autonomous status of the work of art has been destabilized and the boundary between artefact and artwork, between document and construct, fact and fiction has been harder to establish. Many of the artificial plants or flowers, made from plastic, cloth or paper specimens, have been stolen from restaurants, lifted from waiting-rooms and funeral parlours or pocketed at someone’s house.
