This document discusses issues surrounding the canon, market, and definitions of value and authenticity in African art. It summarizes a proposal from Dr. Mumbe, a Congolese professor living in Canada, to sell over 400 pieces from his collection of mostly Congolese art to a Western institution. While Dr. Mumbe and three African art experts vouch for the authenticity and quality of the pieces, colleagues of the author expressed doubts due to the pieces' rougher appearance and lack of documented provenance compared to pieces in the African art canon. The author reflects on ongoing debates around what defines value, authenticity, and the canon in African art and how Western collectors, markets, and aesthetics have come to largely

1. Critical Interventions 7, Fall 2010
About a year ago, a gentleman whom I will
call Dr. Mumbe1
contacted me with a proposal
of acquisition for several nkondi and other art
pieces from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Dr. Mumbe is a Congolese-born, Paris-educated
professor of sociology who has lived in Canada
since the late 1970s and has, over the years,
and apparently with the blessing of Congolese
authorities, amassed a collection of mostly
Congolese art that he now feels should become
part of a public institution in the Western world.
Dr. Mumbe’s collection is large and consists
of over 400 pieces. A selection of about 60
artworks is presented to institutions by way of a
self-produced full color catalog introducing the
collector, his personal story, and texts written by
experts in African arts—all African themselves—
with PhDs from Western institutions. Each expert
declares the authenticity and originality of the
pieces presented for acquisition.
Yet when I informally consulted a number
of colleagues for an opinion on speciic pieces,
the reaction was unanimously dubious or quite
negative. Although presented as masterpieces
in a format similar to the catalogs of major
auction houses (Figure 1), Mumbe’s pieces
appear visually rougher and, more importantly,
lack the documented collection history and
pedigree, which are fundamental appendices
of those traditional pieces that compose the
African art canon. While Dr. Mumbe is aware of
these discrepancies, he feels that his status as a
Congolese, backed up by the assessment of three
African experts, should more than compensate
and provide a irm foundation on which to base
the value of his collection.
Dr. Mumbe maintains a passionate conviction
that his personal cultural background constitutes
an undeniable testimony to the quality of the
works in his collection, and he is quite vocal
about the need to base the evaluation of African
art works on local parameters rather than on
aesthetic criteria established by Western experts.
At the same time, by comparing his own works
to the high profile collections sold in major
auction houses, he also claims a point of entry
into the same system of value assessment that
he otherwise critiques. This encounter made
me rethink a number of issues that have been
amply debated in the African art literature over
the last four decades but that are still far from
being unanimously agreed upon by the different
participants in the African art network. Although
referred to as a “dead horse” on the pages of
African Arts almost 20 years ago,2
definitions
of value, authenticity, and the construction of
a canon of African art continue to be sensitive
topics. Dealers, collectors, auction houses, art
historians, and anthropologists, and more recently
scholars, dealers, and collectors from the African
continent all bring to the debate perspectives that
relect a different positional involvement with the
arts of Africa. In many ways, these perspectives
reflect and at times reinforce longstanding
differentials of cultural capital and hegemonic
positions that deny at their origins the potential
transformative effect of a dialogue. While all this
makes for a stimulating intellectual debate, it is
Ambiguous VAlues And incommensurAble clAims:
The Canon, The Market and Entangled Histories of Collections and Exhibits
Silvia Forni, Royal Ontario Museum

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Figure 1. A Statement of Legitimation. William W. Brill Collection of African Art auction at Sotheby’s New
York on November 12, 2006. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

3. 154 Forni
Critical Interventions 7, Fall 2010
quite unsettling from a museum practitioner’s
point of view, where preferences, choices, and
decisions acquire very tangible ethical, political,
and economic consequences.
In the presentation that Mumbe makes of
his collection, one immediately problematic
aspect that emerges is the use of the “language
of masterpieces” for objects that lack the visual
refinement of the most celebrated examples
and, more importantly, have not followed the
“appropriate” path of canonization. Even though
it is evident that in the course of the twentieth
century, there has been an expansion of the
types of objects accepted as art in private and
public collections following changes in taste and
intellectual approaches to the arts of Africa,
“masterpieces” always seem to share some
fundamental tangible and intangible qualities.
On 30 November 2010, a stool attributed to
the Buli master was sold at a Sotheby’s auction
in Paris for the record-breaking igure of roughly
7.2 million dollars; that same day a Fang head
with an impeccable pedigree was sold for over
1.2 million dollars. In the case of the Luba stool,
the masterpiece status was established by more
than a century of scholarship and publications.
Emblematically, it was also connected to the quest
for the “master hand” in African art, initiated
by Olbrechts in 1946 and advanced during
the second half of the twentieth century by a
number of scholars. In a similar way, the Fang
head owes its record-breaking price to its rarity
and early publication history. The Luba stool and
the Fang reliquary head stand among the broadly
acknowledged and uncontested masterpieces of
African art whose value is predicated on beauty,
rarity, antiquity, and most importantly on a well
documented collection and publication history
within the Western art system. These are the
objects that occupy the highest ranks of the
African art canon as it is deined and appreciated
by connoisseurs and collectors whose tastes,
interests, and money ultimately determines the
fortune and appreciation of the increasingly
rare “authentic antique” African artwork. With
this, I certainly do not mean to imply that the
importance and the quality of such pieces may
not be recognized and acknowledged by Luba or
Fang critics, yet their signiicance is not assessed
on the basis of the effective “visual articulation
of memory,”3
the “principles of opposition
and vitality,”4
or any other relevant parameters
of appreciation in their context of production,
which may have included their original economic
value and ability to visibly manifest their owners’
cultural cachet.
In a 1996 article, Christopher Steiner
compares the canon of art history to the caste
system in India as analyzed by Louis Dumont in
Homo Hierarchicus. Just as status is legitimated in
the Indian caste system by “powerful subjugating
myths of origin and sacred notions of ritual
purity,”5
so too does the art historical canon
operate as a “structuring structure” that shapes
the scholarly fields and markets of African
art through very strict parameters that ensure
value.6
Even though the canon is not ixed and
new objects eventually find their way within
its structure—as a consequence of shifting
aesthetic parameters and the scarcity of objects
on the market7
—the canon and market remain
spheres of inluence still in great part controlled
by Western connoisseurs, dealers, and collectors.
This control has very signiicant inancial and
discursive consequences that should not be
underestimated. Steiner also points out that, more
than in any other art historical ield, African art
is a sphere in which collectors—many of whom
have never set foot on the African continent—
have inluenced the formation of taste and the
construction of aesthetic value in the study and
exhibition of the artwork:8
“Unlike some art

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genres where scholarship has guided public desire,
in African art it has always been the other way
around.”9
Quite strikingly, in a domain in which
the authenticity of an art object is still commonly
deined by the artist’s intention to produce for
local use as opposed to the market, and on the
original functional, spiritual, or symbolic purpose
of the piece, value is ultimately based on Western
aesthetic sensitivities and the collection history
acquired by the piece once removed from its
original context. In the constitutive foundational
myth of African art, the fundamental aesthetic
value of a piece produced for local audiences
and for local purposes and meanings is un-
problematically transparent to the eye of the
well-educated Western outsiders who ultimately
control the fortune and appreciation of these
artifacts-metamorphized-into-art within a still
predominantly white circle of collectors of
masterpieces. Furthermore, while in the context
of the art market, value is assessed based on
very concrete monetary terms; the original
economic interactions that brought an artwork
to life are erased from its history, denying the
indigenous value embodied in these objects in
favor of an almost “magical” understanding of
their essences. African art objects thus come to
embody a projection of otherness that can be
easily controlled and possessed without engaging
with the somewhat complicated reality of their
contexts of production. As pointed out by Jean
Baudrillard in The System of Collecting, stripping an
object of its complex layering of social functions
is an essential prerequisite of the self-relexive
desire to possess that is at the base of collecting.
“The collection”, he states, “offers us a paradigm
of perfection […] within a space where the
everyday prose of the object-world modulates
into poetry, to institute an unconscious and
triumphant discourse.”10
Yet, it is impossible not
to notice how this discourse remains tied to a very
Western-focused sphere of control and aesthetic
understanding. As Valentin Mudimbe11
would
pose it, the creation of African art is the result of
a dialectical process within Western subjectivity,
or more bluntly, as denounced by Richard Bell
in another postcolonial setting, African art “is a
white thing”.12
In the discursive limitation of the scope
and relevance of African art objects, the
transformations in artistic production and
practices as well as the agency of artists, patrons,
traders, and dealers on the African continent are
often concealed from an object’s record. Although
important scholarly and exhibition work over the
last four decades has successfully documented
evolving creative agendas and identiied a number
of artists and workshops,13
the majority of the
makers of the highly valued pieces in Western
collections are unknown.14
Indeed, the idea of
an artist sometimes producing masks, stools,
or figures both for locals and expatriates, or
exclusively for the tourist and international
markets, clashes quite strongly with the myth of
purity, authenticity, and essential difference that
still inspires many African art collectors today.15
At the same time, the growing historical work
on the early colonial and scientiic collections
shows clearly that production and forms were
adapted very promptly in response to European
collecting demands.16
In these cases though,
the relative antiquity of the objects seems to
compensate where the lack of use falters: while
these early adaptation pieces, such as the igurative
Mangbetu art analyzed by Enid Schildkrout and
Curtis Keim17
are still considered masterpieces,
most of the artwork produced by artists and
workshops operating in the second half of the
twentieth century are looked upon with suspicion
or simply dismissed as fakes.
The cultural significance of these more
recent and less idealized productions, as well

5. 156 Forni
Critical Interventions 7, Fall 2010
as the ideological mechanisms regulating the
African art market system, have been the focus
of a number of scholarly works since the 1980s.18
Still, canonical parameters hold very strong when
it comes to the expectation of what kinds of
artifacts should be acquired by and exhibited in
public institutions and, as a consequence, the
image of African art transmitted to the museum
going public is necessarily informed by canonical
preferences. In many instances, there seems
to be a strong gap between the inclusiveness
and broad scope of scholarship and the much
narrower deinition of a museum quality object,
despite the fact that quality parameters may vary
from museum to museum based on their focus,
mission, and historical or inancial circumstances.
My professional interest in these matters has
morphed into a stronger awareness following my
move from a university to a museum environment.
Indeed, while my ield research focuses on the
local meanings and agencies of objects regardless
of their canonical conformity, as a curator
responsible for collecting and displaying within
the framework of a generalist museum, I have
often been reminded—mostly by collectors and
dealers who have approached me in my new
institutional role—of the need to acquire and
select pieces that present the strength of African
art in a canonical way.
While this is certainly the safest way to go
about it, it also seems a rather limiting approach
that does not reflect the greater part of the
art-producing dynamics of the last half of the
century. If we follow the strictest definition
of canonical inclusion, it is easy to discount
objects such as those in Mumbe’s collection as
problematic. However, the reality is that there are
so many examples of these types of productions
in auction houses, galleries, and private and public
collections that it becomes equally problematic to
ignore them.
As an anthropologist and a curator I am
interested in relecting on the question of what
to do with the mass of objects that falls outside
the strict limitations of the art canon: objects
for which the provenance is unknown or muddy,
objects that may have been used or danced for
a short while before being sold, and objects that
may not have even been used, yet they are the
result of the creative effort and skill of African
artists operating all over the continent. While
I agree with the argument that a commercial
reproduction of, for example, a kpeli mask can
be considered a fake mask based on the fact that
it was never intended to be owned and danced by
members of a Poro society, I question whether we
can intellectually discount the fact that we can still
talk about Senufo art for pieces produced in local
workshops with the intention of being sold on the
market. Yet I am aware that the situation is more
complicated than this. If, for example, scholars
such as Eberhard Fischer, Hans Himmelheber,
and Lorenz Homberger through their extensive
research in the 1970s and 1980s were able to
identify a large number of “traditional” and
“commercial” carvers among the Dan and Guro
of Ivory Coast that still produce objects in local
styles,19
today the majority of the centers of
commercial production specialize in a variety of
popular styles, whereby it is possible to acquire a
Kongo style nkisi made in Douala by a carver from
Gabon, or a Benin style brass leopard made by
a master caster of the Cameroonian Grassields.
The problem is that, with few exceptions,
we really know so little about these pieces. While
every art historian and anthropologist who has
done material-focused research in Africa has likely
encountered commercial workshops working either
in local or continental style, few have produced
published accounts of these encounters, and once
removed from the workshop, the creative history
of a piece is likely to be recast or manipulated

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by one or the other of the numerous actors
that mediate its journey to Western collections.
Paradoxically, the strict criteria of inclusion in
the canon have made it very difficult to track
the artistic itineraries of many of these mid- to
late-twentieth century makers, who in many cases
remain as unknown as their nineteenth century
counterparts. Because of the Western art market
demand for traditional, unattributed objects
that conformed to the criteria of authenticity,
the narrative attached to all traditional-looking
objects coming out of Africa repeated the same
comforting refrain, despite the evidence that
a broad array of workshops was active in the
production of masks, igures, stools, and the like.
The consequences of this lack of information on
the productive and creative processes of many
of the twentieth century pieces are different. On
one level, it reinforces the stereotype that African
art is a form of “natural cultural phenomena,”
a manifestation of culture that does not require
individual artistry and agency. On another level, it
promotes the creation of a wide range of objects
that conceal through their traditional look an array
of complex dynamics informed by important
transformations in African societies and systems
of thought. For the most part, these objects are
pariahs of the canon, objects that make serious
dealers and collectors uncomfortable, yet they
are almost inescapably present in many private
collections in search of institutional homes.
Here, the issue becomes even pricklier. While
there are certainly a number of connoisseurs,
scholars, and experts that can make very careful
and grounded assessments of the quality and age
of a piece of African art and its conformity to
known and well-documented examples, collectors
will rarely admit that their collection is infused
with commercial replicas. And while some may be
ready to declare that they did not intend to collect
“masterpieces,” most would still argue that the
pieces in their collection conform to the canonical
deinition of authenticity. This afirmation may on
the one hand relect a longing for the idealized
metaphysical power attributed to traditional
artifacts, but on the other it is connected to a
very concrete matter of assessment regarding the
monetary value of the collection. Indeed, given
the fact that so much African art in collections
does not come with a great deal of documentation,
there is always room for disagreement.20
And to
complicate things further, if the objects lack
historical documentation, intangible elements, such
as the donor’s social and economic status, may
become far more important in determining the
desirability and value of an artwork or collection.
Adding aura to a collection by framing
it within the aesthetic quest of a high status
collector of reined knowledge and great taste
is a common practice of major auction houses
since at least the 1960s.21
The economic and
social capital of an individual or family are also
critical in making sure that a collector’s legacy
may be recognized and perpetuated through an
institutional acquisition. In auctions, this is quite
evident from the catalog presentations of many
African art collections (Figure 2). Whether the
consigner is named or not—as in the case of the
December 2010 Sotheby auction in Paris—the
importance of the objects is enhanced by their
framing within the reined environment of the
collector’s home. While buyers undoubtedly still
make decisions based on the quality of the objects,
and not every piece will be considered of equal
value, the cultural capital of the owner is used as
a means to enhance the appreciation not only of
the masterpieces in the collection but also of the
weaker pieces in the group. Bourdieu reminds us
that the value of the objectiied cultural capital,
such as private collections, is intrinsically linked
to the embodied cultural capital of the individual,
and thus impossible to fully transmit and inherit.22

7. 158 Forni
Critical Interventions 7, Fall 2010
Nevertheless, the visual and conceptual layout
of auction catalogs clearly invokes the symbolic
association of possession and competence that
characterizes the social perception of cultural
capital. Even though this capital is not transmitted
through the auction sale, where the objects in
fact revert to commodity status and are dispersed
to become part of new collection and aesthetic
legacies, the memory and historical record of
ownership become key attributes of the objects.
On the other hand, if groups of artworks are
donated to institutions, the association of the
donor with the collection is permanently ixed
and celebrated. The essays in the volume recently
edited by Kathleen Bickford-Berzock and Christa
Clarke illustrate several examples of inluential
donors that have informed the tenor of African art
collections in several American museums.23
Similar
stories and examples may be found in institutions
all over the world. In Canada, this is particularly
noticeable—when compared with Europe and
the US—as fewer individuals and institutions
have historically engaged in the collection of
African art. Here, a number of large and small
art institutions have acquired the entirety of their
African collection from a single donor whose
personal aesthetic legacy is then morphed into the
institutional presentation of the Arts of Africa. In
certain cases—such as the Art Gallery of Ontario
in Toronto—the institution was able to acquire
objects of very high quality linked to one another
by the particular and selective taste of their donor.
The result is a beautiful display that introduces a
new component to the museum narrative, although
this may be read more effectively as a material
portrait of the donor than as an historically or
canonically representative selection of the Arts
of Africa. In other instances—as with the 100+
piece donation to the Art Gallery of Hamilton—
institutions receive a more layered batch of objects
that nevertheless is presented with a masterpiece
rhetoric that is more in line with the economic
status of the donor than with the aesthetic
significance and pedigree of the pieces. The
problem, introduced by this last example, is not
just that the quality of the objects does not always
correspond to the cultural or economic capital of
a collector, but that many institutions do not or
cannot, because of the donor’s sway, deal with
the African objects beyond what has become a
stereotypical “traditional art” display model, even
when the objects do not it within the ideal that
deines canonical art forms. By presenting objects
with minimal information, the history, cultural
role, and value of the pieces remain hidden and so
are their complex connections with the tastes and
demands of the international art market. Despite
the fact that it is extremely difficult to convey
nuance in displays driven more by word counts,
design limitations, and architectural visions than
by curatorial content, the still generally accepted
limiting deinition of what constitutes “African
art” encourages somewhat deceptive and ultimately
non-informative displays that reinforce without
challenging the expectations of the public.
Figure 2. Cover of self produced presentation
catalog. Courtesy of the Bondo Family Collection.

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Fortunately, this is not the only type of
display that the public may encounter in Western
institutions. As Christraud Geary has very
convincingly demonstrated in the exhibition
Material Journeys,24
there are interesting stories to be
told even with objects that would not reach ive- or
six-igure hammer prices in auction houses. There
are elements of African creativity, aesthetics, and
agency that may be embodied in objects that fall
outside the strict deinition of canon, and yet,
if given proper scholarly attention, may be rich
and stimulating. This is something one quickly
learns doing research in Africa, and these are
contents that an increasing number of scholarly
curated exhibitions put forward. But as Simon
Ottenberg pointed out in his response to Sidney
Kasir’s article “African Art and Authenticity,”
the penetration of these canon-challenging ideas
outside the scholarly field “is not likely to be
more than minuscule, since scholarship does not
dominate the direction of the art market.”25
This
appears also quite clearly when it comes to inding
sponsorship for exhibitions: while comforting
narratives of “world treasures” always have a
strong appeal, it is much more dificult to ind
sponsors that would associate their name with
anything less than a masterpiece.
Yet as a scholar working in a museum of world
cultures, I ind that it is an inspiring challenge to
distinguish between the monetary value of a piece
and its potential intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic
value. Because they are entangled in complicated
local and global histories, African art objects can
be crucial material sources for the understanding
of the creative, social, political, and historical
dynamics that have brought them to life, provided
that we are able to avoid the concealment of these
trajectories in favour of a more established yet
arbitrary canonical ordering.
To return to the case of Dr. Mumbe, while
I sympathize with his passionate claims that
undoubtedly reveal the still strong colonial
matrix of the African art market, I am still not
able to accept his collection as he is trying to
propose it. Dr Mumbe’s argument is ideologically
compelling and reminiscent of inspiring post-
colonial challenges, but on a very practical level
his goal is the replacement of one essentialism
with another: an almost irreducible “nativistic”
understanding of the artworks in place of
Western artistic sensitivity and cultural capital.26
Yet Mumbe’s nativism is in many ways equally
constructed: indeed his collection practice does
not seem to differ radically from that of Western
ield collectors. Even if he was born in a Kongo
village, Mumbe spent most of his life in France
and Canada, and mostly purchased the artwork
from intermediaries who also provided many of
the interesting stories associated with the pieces.
Furthermore, by celebrating his role as a native
collector, he is not really trying to contest the
system, but, by claiming a different grounding
on which expertise is assessed, he is instead
trying to beneit from the economic appreciation
of African art on equal terms with Western
collectors. While this within and of itself could
be a poetically subversive achievement, I believe
that, given the present conditions, Dr. Mumbe’s
quest for high-end market recognition may be
quite dificult. That said, it would be a fascinating
project to explore the signiicance of the objects
in his collection beyond the determination of
their market price. Had he approached me with
a different value proposition, one that would allow
an engagement with the artworks not exclusively
as canonical masterpieces but as sources of
potentially different material meanings, our
conversation may have taken a different course.
As Achille Mbembe very aptly states:
because the time we live in is
fundamentally fractured, the very

9. 160 Forni
Critical Interventions 7, Fall 2010
project of an essentialist […] recovery
of the self is, by deinition, doomed.
Only the disparate and often intersecting
practices through which Africans stylize
their conduct and life can account for
the thickness of which the African
present is made.27
This stylized “thickness” that escapes any
reductive canonical understanding of African
creativity is a fascinating yet elusive art historical
challenge that is still too often hidden from view
in collections and museum displays.
Notes
A version of this paper was presented at the XIII
Triennial Symposium of the African Studies
Association in March 2011. I am grateful to Michael
Conner for organizing the panel “African Art and the
Marketplace” that stimulated my relections on this
topic. I would also like to thank Sylvester Ogbechie,
Constantine Petridis and Ferdinand De Jong for their
critical reading and insightful comments.
1
Pseudonym.
2
The appeal to stop beating a dead horse was
voiced by a few of the participants in the
dialogue following the publication of Sidney
Kasir’s “African Art and Authenticity: A Text
with a Shadow,” African Arts, 25, 4 (1992): 41-
53, 96. While many of the critical remarks in the
dialogue that unfolded in the following two issues
of the journal rightly highlighted the sensitive
scholarship and curatorial work challenging the
restrictive canons of authenticity, this seems to
still hold very strongly when it comes to the
building of private and institutional collections.
3
Mary Nooter Roberts, “The Naming Game.
Ideologies of Lube Artistic Identity,” African
Arts, 31, 4 (1998): 51-73, 90.
4
James Fernandez, “Principles of Opposition
and Vitality in Fang Aesthetics,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Artistic Criticism, 25 (1966): 53-64.
5
Christopher B. Steiner, “Can the Canon Burst?”
The Art Bulletin, 78, 2 (1996): 213.
6
Ibid., 217.
7
The shifts and changes in the Western art
culture system have been analyzed by, among
others, James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture.
Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988),
216-229.
8
Christopher B. Steiner, “The Taste of Angels
in the Art of Darkness: Fashioning the Canon
of African Art,” in Art History and its Institutions:
Foundations of a Discipline, Elizabeth Mansield,
ed., 132-145. (London and New York: Routledge,
2002), 133.
9
Ibid.
10
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in
The Cultures of Collecting, John Elsner and Roger
Cardinal, eds., (London: Reaction Books, 1994),
7-24, 7.
11
Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis,
Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988).
12
Australian artist Richard Bell won the 2003
Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait
Islander Art Award with a large canvas featuring
the words “Aboriginal Art—It’s A White Thing.”
See Richard Bell, Bell’s Theorem of Aboriginal art: It’s
a White Thing (Brisbane: Brisbane Institute, 2003).
13
As mentioned earlier, while the concern for the
master hand was initiated by Olbrecht’s work
in the 1940s, it is only since the 1960s that this
has become a more widespread scholarly focus.
Attention to the artist is evident in the work
of many scholars in the ield, such as Roland
Abidioun, Henry Drewal, Johannes Fabian,
Richard Fardon, John Pemberton, John Picton,
Mary Nooter Roberts, Doran Ross, Zoe Strother,
Susan Vogel, Roslyn Walker, and many others. See,
for example, the essays contained in the two part
special issue, “Authorship in African Art,” African
Arts, 31, 4 (1998), and African Arts, 32, 1 (1999).

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14
A very important exception to this rule is the art
of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, among whom
a number of important master carvers have been
identiied and given recognition to, since the early
studies in this area. However, the art historical
knowledge available for the Yoruba context is
quite unique in the ield of African Art history.
15
Informative in this regard are many of the
portraits of African art collectors in Susan Vogel,
ed., The Art of Collecting African Art, (New York:
The Center for African Art, 1988).
16
See, for example, the illuminating essays in Enid
Schildkrout and Curtis Keim, eds., The Scramble
for Art in Central Africa, (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
17
Enid Schildkrout and Curtis Keim, African
Relections: Art from Northeastern Zaire, (New
York and Seattle: AMNH and University of
Washington Press, 1990).
18
See for example the work of Paula Ben Amos,
Shelly Errington, Bennetta Jules Rosette, Sidney
Kasir, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Sally Price,
and Christopher Steiner, just to name a few.
19
A very detailed and informative account of
different carvers and workshops in the Guro
area may be found in Eberhard Fischer, Guro:
Masks, Performances and Master Carvers in Ivory
Coast. (Zurich and Munich: Museum Reitberg;
Prestel, 2008), 433-452.
20
A colleague from a smaller Canadian museum
told me recently that they refrained from
accepting a large donation of African art given
the array of contradictory assessments that
they were receiving. A collector of Ogoni art
motivated his focus based on the conviction that,
being a less widely known artistic tradition, there
would be fewer fakes circulating on the market,
while another gentleman confessed to me that
he stopped collecting African art after attending
an auction in the company of a dealer he trusted
who revealed to him that piece that had been
hammered for over $50,000 was considered by
many dealers in the room to be a fake.
21
The irst African arts sale catalog to make full use
of the social and aesthetic capital of a collector
is the 1966 Parke-Bernet Galleries catalog of the
sale of the estate of cosmetic tycoon Helena
Rubinstein. Not surprisingly this was also the
auction during which many pieces including a
very famous igure of a Bangwa queen achieved
record-breaking prices.
22
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in
Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of
Education, John G. Richardson ed., (New York,
Greenwood Press, 1986), 244-245.
23
Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke,
eds., Representing Africa in American Art Museums:
A Century of Collecting and Display, (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2011).
24
Christraud M. Geary and Stephanie Xatart,
Material Journeys: Collecting African and Oceanic Art,
1945-2000, (Boston: MFA Publications, 2007).
25
Simon Ottenberg “Scholars and the Art
Networks,” African Arts, 25, 3 (1992): 32.
26
Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self
Writing,” Public Culture, 14, 1 (2002): 253.
27
Ibid., 271-72.