Recent trends in curatorship (showing videotapes of objects in use,supplementing academic explanations with those of ´native informants,´attributing some traditional masterpieces to individual artists)attempt to reconstruct functional and cultural contexts for Africanartworks. Nonetheless, these trends also form a self-reflexivecritique. They open an ´interstitial´ space of anxiety, exposing theuneasy negotiations between colonial forms of connoisseurship and artcollecting -- implicated as they are in imperial exploitation and inthe dehistoricization of the ´primitive´ central to ethnography -- andthe postcolonial museum.
social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i2/newart.htm