First, certain acknowledgements must be made. I’ve never been to the MET before. It’s awesome. It’s also huge – it feels as big as the Louvre inside but not outside. It has an interesting economic model – they ask you to pay for what you think is fair, which runs about $10 dollars (agent at least said so) for most ordinary people.
I went straight to the Africa and America’s section and spent most of my time in the West Africa and the new special exhibit on New York and African art. The latter was small and revolved around the advent of African art into the New York art collection scene and the contributions of key characters (this is interesting, because of all the racism at the time, to endorse ‘negro art’ was revolutionary). The former was more expansive but by no means voluminous.
On the whole I left with a lot of questions pinging about in my noggin:
- How come we don’t have a more robust museum culture in Nigeria? And most of Africa as I understand it?
- Our art is OLD. Yet most portrayals of our art present it as primitive or is juxtaposed with narratives of our culture as primitive.
- Our art is abstract. It’s probable our artists could represent the human form like classical greek forms – afterall we all look the same to a certain extent all over the world. But for the most part we didn’t – elongated heads, weird body and face proportions, exaggerated dimensions and forms – it’s all there. We were abstract before abstract was a thing. How come?
- We didn’t develop paint based art until much later. The European luxuriated in it for centuries. From what I have seen of Asian cultures, so did they. Why the discrepancy?
- What was the mentality of the early collectors of African art? They were trendy sure, but did they ever see the source as more than primitive people?
There’s are a lot more questions, these just spring to mind more readily. There’s probably a couple of PHDs somewhere who can answer these questions. Why isn’t there an app for that? Or maybe I should head to Quora…
