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The Cubists' fascination with African and Oceanic art and its revolutionary influence on Western art in the early 1900s is an important stage in the development of modern art. Meanwhile in Africa, in what is now Nigeria, there was a reciprocal interest in Western figurative art, which eventually led to the establishment of academic art education in West Africa. This second story, however, is much less known and, when it is told, the adoption of Western influences has generally been seen as passive and even damaging. Now that these 'othered' voices are claiming attention and bringing their views to the art historical debate, Western and non-Western art narratives need to be retold from new perspectives. This article examines two moments, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the 20th century, when the West has enhanced its artistic production by leaning on influences from elsewhere while maintaining the right to grant or deny the status of art for cultural objects to itself. The article calls into question Western practices in categorising products of visual expression and highlights the contractual nature of art historical classifications and canons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional Urhobo society attempts to achieve stability by resolving personal and public social conflicts. The mechanisms employed for this include using art objects in rituals. No detailed scholarly attention, however, seems to have been given to identifying and classifying these conflict-resolution devices in previous studies of the art and culture histories of the Urhobo. In this paper, the social conflict situations prevalent in Urhobo traditional society and their resolution mechanisms are examined. Three categories of social conflicts and two resolution mechanisms are identified and classified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the way in which two interrelated African societies, the Bamana and Malinke of Mali, viewed the production of art. It explores Bamana and Malinke ideas about when an art object is finished and why the ending of an object's life is so fraught with danger for its user. The article concludes that, from the Bamana and Malinke viewpoint, the most difficult part of artistic creation is the bringing into being and eventually the dissipation of a non-visible component of uncanny power associated with any ritual object.

The author discusses how objects of African visual culture emerge with meanings from cross-cultural dialogues. He investigates the strategies that are used to isolate the object and to insert it into the discursive spaces of disciplines like art history or anthropology. He describes how essayists seek to understand the consequences for western disciplines when they include African objects into their purview. The book "Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire," by Johannes Fabian is referenced.