Just in time for Valentine's Day ... The blog Material World, the "online hub for contemporary debates, discussion, thinking and research centred on material and visual culture," invites its readers to participate in a forum to critique the recent re-installation of Metropolitan Museum of Art's Pacific galleries -- or to quote post author Haidy Geismar, "the enshrinement of Oceanic material culture 'as art.'"
Geismar wonders aloud whether the galleries' new emphasis on authorship isn't in fact behindhand, and that in the end the display puts the objects' aesthetic properties ahead of their original social context.
To salt the forum the original post includes commentaries from three authors: a descriptive and behind-the-scenes contribution by Fanny Wonu Veys, formerly a graduate intern in AAOA; and two critiques by academic authors outside the museum's walls, the latter focusing in part on the observations visitors overheard by the writer.
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