Contemporaneous Traditions: The World in Indigenous Art/Indigenous Art in the World

Abstract

The incomprehension is evident in the most astute critics-such as Foster-as if here the new universal principle of global capitalism is held in suspension in case it disintegrates if applied to Indigenous art. [...]today Indigenous art is what Zizek called a 'symptom' rather than accepted as 'typical' or an example of the 'concrete existence' of the 'Universal' i.e., of global capitalism. By trading the ethnicity of their art for Western cosmopolitanism, the critical reception of their art preserved the myths of the West and progress that regulated the twentieth-century understanding of modernity. Indigenous nations are within and sometimes across several nation states. [...]for them modernity has not been experienced simply in terms of citizenship and national identity.