An Aesthetics for the Art of Adornment in Africa
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Description
In the past few decades, the traditional art of Africa has been rescued from a purely sociological reading. Although masks, stools, woven fabrics, goldweights, sculptures, body-painting, bracelets, headdresses, ceremonial staffs, household decoration—the total range, in fact, of the arts of Africa—are often usefully seen in the perspective of the social and political life of their culture, it is essential that we should also be able to make sense of them as aesthetic objects. I propose to discuss what this means, in the case of artifacts of adornment, and argue that this is a very pure case of the aesthetic, and one that resolves a tension between anthropological and art-historical approaches.
Source Publication
Beauty by Design: The Aesthetics of African Adornment
Source Editors/Authors
Marie-Thérèse Brincard
Publication Date
1984
Recommended Citation
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, "An Aesthetics for the Art of Adornment in Africa" (1984). Faculty Chapters. 197.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/197
