The question is rhetorical, that is, uttered for effect, to make a statement rather than to obtain an answer. It was first heard in 2001 during a discussion of the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies when Jan Mrazek suggested bringing together Asia experts to produce papers on the relationship between the function and the objectification of Asian art.
As phrased by Robert de Caroli, one of the authors in this resulting volume, the question refers to "the commonly accepted truth that the meanings attributed to objects are not inherent to the objects themselves." Original meanings ignored, the meanings now associated with the object (shard, pot, statue, painting) have been constructed. They are now associated (in museums, particularly) with notions of status, exhibition, display.
Or, as Richard H. Davis asks in his paper, what happens when "local decorative traditions, intended solely for domestic viewing, become accessible to a broader audience of art viewers and collectors?"
A spectacular demonstration of what happens is the case of Andre Malraux, author, critic, eventual Cabinet minister and longtime "collector" who "rescued" much Angkor sculpture by wrenching it from its original site and shipping it off to French museums. The moral argument commonly offered is that this is good for what now became art objects, saved from irresponsible owners who could not appreciate them anyway. That the looting continues is well documented in Ashley Thompson's paper on the subject.
Indeed Asia continues as a lucrative reservoir for this activity. As noted by Kaja M. McGowam, the looting of shrines in Bali appears to be a recurrent pastime. Stanley O'Conner says that by illegal methods beloved heirlooms are being snatched from their ancestral villages and delivered into the clutches of urban dealers who are "part of the inter-related web of commerce, scholarship and desire that is the modern art world."
The book is divided into three sections, the first ("Functions") contains papers by Louise Allison Cort on Japanese pottery, Richard H. Davis on the ritual arts of Madhubani, and Janet Hoskins on Sumba fabrics. The second ("Movements") offers James L. Hevia's account of the European adventures of plundered Chinese imperial objects, and Cynthia J. Boel's exploration into just what the eighth-century priest, Kukai, brought back to Japan from China. The third ("Memories") gives us Lene Pedersen's inquiry into what occurs to the "keri" (ancestral swords) of Bali, and Jan Mrazek, who contributed the introduction, offers a final essay on the fate of the Javanese Wayang puppet drama when exposed to art, art history and television.
The rhetorical question posed by the title is answered by ample evidence that creating new contexts has a lot more to answer for than trendy galleries and blockbuster museum shows. As Stefan Tanaka has written. "Just as the museum is historical but displays artifacts as if it is presenting history, thereby occluding its historicity, the nation-state has managed to replace its historicity with various objects that present the chronology of a national history as if it is natural."
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