Hope, ethics & disenchantment: a critical sociological inquiry into the Aboriginal art phenomenon

Aboriginal art has come to occupy a significant space in the Australian cultural landscape. It has also achieved international recognition as one of the most interesting aesthetic movements of recent decades and has become highly valuable within the art market. Yet there is much that remains obscure about Aboriginal art. It seems at once unstoppable and precarious: an effervescent cultural renaissance that is highly vulnerable to malign forces. This thesis brings a critical sociological perspective to bear upon the unruly character of the Aboriginal art phenomenon. It adopts a reflexive and interdisciplinary approach that brings into dialogue scholarship from several fields, including anthropology of art, art history and criticism, post-colonial critique, sociology of art and culture, theories of modernity, theories of cross-cultural brokerage and Australian political history. By taking this approach, it is able to illuminate the intellectual and aesthetic practices, social movements and political events that have been constitutive of Aboriginal arts meaning and value from the late 19th Century to the present. It foregrounds the various social, political and economic causes to which Aboriginal art has been anchored, and reveals the contingencies of Aboriginal arts status as both a genre of fine art and a highly symbolic and commercialized form of visual culture. It also reveals that the entities of the Aboriginal art object and the Aboriginal artist have an extraordinary motility within the clashing frames of the Aboriginal fine arts movement, the speculative Aboriginal art market, and the Aboriginal arts and culture industry. Ultimately the thesis argues that Aboriginal art has been a theatre for the redemptive project pursued by governments and civil society in post-assimilation Australia to repair Indigenous/non-indigenous relations, that it has been a significant medium for transnational post-colonial critique, and that it has resonated strongly with disenchanted perspectives on industrial capitalist modernity. It reveals the myriad ways in which the politics of the Settler State have been refracted through the Aboriginal art arena and shows that Aboriginal art has been enmeshed within utopian and dystopian currents of thinking about art, modernity and Indigenous social justice in Australia