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By Root 955 0

impossible. They are, of course, not logically impossible, any more than a monkey who accidentally types out Hamlet on word processor is logically impossible. But it isn’t bare logical possibility that makes Danto’s story so seductive. Anyone who was worked area of ethnographic art will tell you that in many individual cases there will be uncertainty about how to take a work: whether to cast it category of art or the category of artifact, or whether to consider tourist piece made for sale to outsiders or as a work of significant spiritual value to the people who made it. Danto, however, is not presenting us with a mistake about some particular work. Rather, he describes a situation where a whole genre or tradition of tribal art is to aesthetically indistinguishable from another genre or tradition of tribal artifact. In point of fact, that a whole art tradition might in the real world be indiscernible from a utilitarian artifact tradition seems to me about as likely a monkey typing Hamlet.

Could we imagine a persis tent pattern of cultural behavior as odd situation Danto portrays? If pots with their mythology and spiritual dimensions have the place he ascribes for the Pot People, if pot-making their most valued art, we would expert Pot People potters to meticulous about the construction and decoration of their pots. They would work according to a critical canon of excellence in design and decoration—with thought and worry going into obtaining the perfect for making them, firing them for exactly the right kind of finish. That would explain why, in Danto’s account, they would admire their best potters and trea sure the finest pots.

Turn for a moment from philosophical thought experiments to a real-life example: the carvers of the Sepik River of New Guinea, where I have conducted fieldwork. Like Danto’s pot- and basket-makers, Sepik carvers produce both works of spiritual and magical significance and works pure utility. Some of their utilitarian carvings are highly expressive. They make canoes with nothing more than a “nice line,” and undecorated earthenware pots, and wooden carving tools. But you’ll also find gliding mallets. There are ancestor figures and healing charms whose significance limited to appeasing some spirit. And finally, with immense areas overlap and ambiguity, there are carvings done simply to sell to tourists; some of these are very fine, while most are quite tawdry.

Europeans new to Sepik art will naturally miss subtle distinctions that are there to be detected in it. But persevere and you may discover the intrinsic differences between a carving of a human form done to sell to a tourist and one made with the utmost seriousness to please the spirit of an ancestor. The tourist, for example, will see the initiation scars carved on the front of the figure but won’t notice if they are omitted from the back. The ancestor spirit will notice the absence of dorsal scars, and also know if the carving is painstakingly fashioned from a hard wood, such as garamut, or is produced in a soft, easy-to-carve wood: spirits don’t like shortcuts, which tourists won’t notice. The spirit may prefer a very large carving, and is not concerned whether it taxes a twenty-kilo luggage limit. The Sepik carver who is working to please a spirit will therefore bring to the job a sense of intense purpose that will show itself in perceptible qualities of the finished art work. To the educated Sepik eye, to the Sepik connoisseur, such inner qualities are as plain to see as passionate intensity is evident to Westerners in the painting of van Gogh. Anyone, Sepik or not, can be skeptical about the seriousness of supernatural intent of a par tic u lar carving; but in most cases questions will no more naturally arise than they do in questioning van Gogh’s seriousness of purpose. Moreover, Sepik criteria of artistic excellence are in principle available to anyone with the time and will to learn to perceive; they are not monadically sealed in Sepik culture. (If they were somehow unlearnable, they couldn’t even be taught to the next generation of