Foreword: Why ‘Art Makes Society’?

If, as James Elkins (2004, 373) warned, that the prospect of world art history is the ‘most pressing problem facing the discipline of art history,’ this issue of World Art emerges out of that concern and offers current insights from archaeological circles. It makes clear that the worlding of art hardly needs to stick closely to recent historical times or to the languages and attendant value systems that, despite much critical effort, have and still continue to dominate much Euroamerican art history.

One of the core aims of World Art is to foster engagement across any disciplines which may help explore art as a form of life. This issue, guest-edited by Elizabeth DeMarrais and John Robb, takes on the bold theme of ‘art makes society’. What makes this issue timely and eye-opening is that the studies treat mainly archaeological material, in both methodological and empirical terms. Archaeology has much to offer in terms of fresh understandings – and, deservingly, debates – about how people imagine and reshape their worlds through art. Scholarship on the archaeological past must take artefacts seriously, both in themselves and as avenues for exploring human behaviour.

To examine this process, the contributors tapped into the vast archaeological record, both in relation to societies now and in historical reckoning but also to the deeper past and those times and places not treated by historical writing. The original operative languages in which the artworks were made are either largely unknown or play relatively little role in their present interpretation. Most of the contributions also show a reliance on anthropology, through an emphasis on material culture, context, technologies, cultural particularities and thick description, which is by obligation here anglophone. By the same token, the contributors do not shy away from ‘art’ and methods and stances more generally associated with art histories: for example, exemplars, phenomenology, aesthetics, formalism, visual traditions and analogies. By continuing to problematise the very notion of ‘world art,’ the contributions in this issue exemplify what we might continue to pack into (and unpack via) a world art history.

George Lau, Veronica Sekules and Margit Thøfner

The Editors, World Art