The Work of Art

The ethical framing of Indigenous art is perhaps the dominant value framework within which the work (if not the works themselves) are placed by many in and outside of Australia. The market, as well as governmental support, is finely attuned to these dimensions of value – dimensions that, the social history of art and certainly the anthropology of art might suggest, have been significant in the construction of “art” as a category since the 19th century. From the early 1970s, policy makers and scholars have attempted to articulate these fields of value, as Indigenous intellectuals and artists have entered and challenged the structure of a complex semi-autonomous field of cultural production. The dominant poles of value were cultural value (for Indigenous culture itself) and economic value (exchange value in the cross-cultural market). Underlying the second term was something that might be called “aesthetic value” but the conflation of value is complicated by the opposition between “commerce” and “fine art” that constitutes the fine art domain itself. I consider this problem and the interweavings of value forms through the lens of one remote Indigenous art cooperative that I know well: Papunya Tula Artists. To show that the economic vicissitudes of Indigenous art are not the only measure of its value, I analyse the strategies undertaken by some remote cooperatives, as well as arenas of activity outside the “market” and outside Australia with “agents” who might be understood to extend the reach of Indigenous artists. This is what I call “the work of Indigenous art”.