Art, artifact

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"Art/Artifact presents 160 objects of art and ethnography selected from the Buffalo Museum of Science, the Hampton University Museum (Virginia), and the American Museum of Natural History (New York City). All three are anthropology museums founded in the 1860s with distinguished African collections. The essays examine the shifting definitions of art and artifact, and deal with the question of how we look at objects from cultures whose classification systems differ from our own. They ask what transforms an ordinary object, or mundane materials, into a work of art: a pile of tires in front of the Whitney Museum is viewed as art where the same pile in a gas station clearly is not."--Back cover