Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (SIGNED COPY)
by: Myers, Fred R.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 410 pages, b&w, color illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the half-title page. Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied--often as a participant-observer--the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions--the world of dealers, museums, and critics.