I just watched a solid mid-90s documentary about African art on YouTube. It focused on the colonial Europeans and subsequent anthropologists wild misinterpretat

I just watched a solid mid-90s documentary about African art on YouTube. It focused on the colonial Europeans and subsequent anthropologists wild misinterpretation of beautiful African objects, and how that was used to justify the oppression. In many African traditions, the idea of "art" as it exists in the European cultural vein doesn't even exist: the aesthetic imbued into the practical everyday objects like masks used in ritual is inextricable from its function and the tradition of craft that informed its construction. It would be ridiculous to say it isn't art, but equally ridiculous to interact with it using Western philosophical conceptions of art. People in dominant positions justified steamrolling people whose humanity was inconvenient, in part, by insisting on the universality of the rigid, outdated, old Western conception of art... and they clearly still do.