Entangled Values: construction of a global conception of Australian Indigenous arts

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Entangled Values: construction of a global conception of Australian Indigenous arts Geraldine Le Roux (AMU -CNRS -EHESS, CREDO UMR 7308) « Ainsi, les acteurs économiques et les acteurs culturels, sans qu"on sache toujours lesquels donnent le la, contribuent indissociablement à la définition et à la hiérarchisation des valeurs artistiques et des réputations des artistes. Le circuit culturel s"impose au marché comme épreuve de vérité. » 1 (Moulin, 1992 : 79) The recent integration of Australian Indigenous arts in the field of contemporary art is the fruit of a complex historical process deeply rooted in social, political and cultural relationships. The Aboriginal art market has grown exponentially over the years and acrylic dot paintings and bark paintings have become international icons of Australian national identity. Aboriginal art has been, and to a certain extent is still, endangered by cheap imitations, fakes and the transgression of Indigenous artists" rights and community protocols. These issues have been addressed by various inquiries and reports since the 1990s. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged from the scholarship produced by researchers such as Morphy and Wright (2000), Jon Altman (2005) and others. These scholars have particularly investigated the community-controlled art centres and outlined how they could be used as a business model. In these studies, the art centres are presented as inter-cultural institutions, as both a commercial and a cultural enterprise in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are active agents.
With artists, art coordinators, curators, art dealers, public officers, art critics, journalists and visitors who interact to define what Aboriginal art is and where and how it should circulate, we could easily consider the Aboriginal art industry as an art world. Drawing on Danto"s work, Howard Becker (1982) describes an art world as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of art works that art world is noted for". What evaluative processes do the cultural intermediaries use to construct and justify their choices? Such "loose network of overlapping subcultures held together by a belief in art" (Thornton, 2008) are challenging fields to explore the process of value creation. This paper is focused on the marketing side of 1 "Therefore, economic actors and cultural actors, without us knowing exactly which ones give the "la", contribute to the definition and prioritization of artistic values and artist"s reputation. The cultural circuit imposes itself to the market as a of truth test". My own translation. the Aboriginal art world because this field reveals significant power relations within the Australian Indigenous arts sector; power relations that open to the construction and negotiation of a complex regime of entangled values.
Reports and academic research often make reference to France in regard to the exportation of Aboriginal art works, probably because of France"s historical role in the Art history.
However, key information is often missing in these reviews. Through an overview of the structure and visions of the Aboriginal art market, I will address the values that consciously or unconsciously motivate this incomplete assessment. Most of the art dealers who are based in France prefer to work predominantly with community-based artists, mainly from the Northern Territory. Observing the impact of this economic rationality on the representation of Aboriginal culture I aim to analyse how art dealers discuss and locate value differences within or between the economic and cultural fields. This will lead me to consider the potential for better economic, social and cultural collaborations to happen between the academic world and the public and private sectors.

I. Structure and visions of the Aboriginal art market in France
Aboriginal art began to be represented by art dealers in France in the second half of the Most of these professionals regularly publish brochures, exhibition catalogues or coffee- define themselves as initiated people, using for example the kinship name to suggest that they have been adopted by an Indigenous family. The integration of biographical elements in publications and conferences is a strategy used by many art dealers in an attempt to make public the private world of art production. The potential buyer is being given the possibility to live this experience through the buying act.
But as I will show now this strategy causes some of the art dealers to emphasize certain values and suppress others. The third art dealer who doesn't have the argument of the life experiences, nor the diplomas, has shifted the focus to the value of the exoticism of the works. These reports indicate that the most unscrupulous carpetbaggers attempt to disconnect the artists from their communities, inviting them to paint in cities, in hotel rooms or in backyards. By isolating the artists for a few days, they can influence them to paint specific stories, patterns and styles, in particular those which are most popular on the market. In so doing, they encourage artists to neglect the protocols of Aboriginal Law, the channel through which these patterns, in accordance with specific rights and social obligations, are passed down from the ancestral beings. In most Indigenous groups, there is an owner, the person who possesses rights on the Dreaming, and a manager, the person who must perform and paint the Dreaming (Glowczewski, 2004;Morphy, 2008). Carpetbaggers neglect the specificities of this form of cultural transmission and cooperation, influencing artists to produce what consumers expect and to paint collectively with whoever is available. Songs and other stories cannot be shared in such a context of industrial production. As many analyses focused on arts centres show (Morphy and Wright, 2000;Altman, 2005), while art centres primarily seek to manage the artists" best interests, investing in equipment, developing exhibitions, and initiating cultural projects for the centre, carpetbaggers influence the hurried production of works. They encourage prestigious artists to paint for a meagre sum, and persuade talentless artists to copy highly valued works. Borrowing Raymonde Moulin's expression (1992), I call these works "paintings by the dozen", an expression that emphasises the notion of reproduction.
Carpetbaggers exert pressures on Indigenous people to encourage a process of production rather than creation, and reproduction over the creative act. As Raymonde Moulin dem- Like other art dealers, he also emphasises the problem of alcoholism and violence. The reference to this 'dysfunctionality' helps them to suggest that "their" artists are the last ones able to paint "authentic" stories, which makes them a good investment. This vision does not only represent Aboriginal society as a dying society, it also leads to a dangerous process of preconceiving what Aboriginal art should be at the exclusion of other experimental forms. This context must be taken into account when considering urban artists" critiques of this system, their desire to break with the idea of a presumed authenticity and with the predicted death of a culture (Le Roux, 2012).
But nothing is clearly bad or good. Some of the art dealers who seem to have high ethics have in reality doubtful practices. They dare to edit the story that goes with the certificate of authenticity in order to make the paintings look more "Aboriginal". They substitute themselves in place of the artist in choosing how the painting should be explained. Experts know that art centre coordinators sometimes do this, but it is done under the supervision of the artist and with his/her prior agreement. Art dealers who edit the story are manipulating an important cultural value to encourage sales. Whereas the Dreamtime story is seen by potential buyers as an index of authenticity, it is in reality the effect of an intercultural relationship in which power relations change over time. At the end of the commodity"s chain, when the artwork has left the community, the art dealer has the capacity to manipulate the index of authenticity. This power relation around values is also seen in the promotional choices made by art dealers: when they promote the buying act as an ethical action that promotes Indigenous sovereignty, they don"t mention that they only support some artists and not the ones who don"t fit with the popular vision of Aboriginality. Mr Piront"s public statements clearly show how the Aboriginal arts exploitation system works. But as we have seen, it is a far more complex process of value creation with aesthetic, political, economic and social values entangled together.

III The value of knowledge
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the pre-eminent policy and funding role of the Australia Council has diminished with the expansion of programs and funds managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and new State and Territory arts funding authorities.
As Fred Myers highlighted in the 1990s, Aboriginal culture increasingly became "the source of Australia"s self-marketing for the international tourist industry, the "difference" they have to offer". (Myers, 1991: 53). Indeed, Aboriginal art became the basis of a multi-million dollar industry and its international exports are worth several millions of dollars. The Myer inquiry and others surveys that aimed to address the economic, social and cultural benefits of Australia"s Indigenous arts sector have pointed out the need to further develop international markets.
These reports mainly frame the promotion of Aboriginal arts in terms of business opportunities. One of them stated that the public sector is less skilled in the area of international cultural trade than the commercial sector. What are the effects and limits of this economic vision of the art industry?
Following the Myer report, the Senate called for an Inquiry and invited artists, art dealers, arts advisors and arts officers to share their experience in addressing the issues and challenges they faced and their vision for the future of the sector. Austrade is the Australian Government"s export and international business facilitation agency and provides access to overseas markets through export market development grants. In their submission to the Senate Inquiry, Austrade provided a list of seven Indigenous art export initiatives that were held in France in the year 2006. This number is incorrect; amongst the missing events, some were conducted by art dealers and one was an exhibition supported by the Australian Embassy"s fund. However, if most reports have a good understanding of the complexity of the Aboriginal art production chain and its circulation within the national territory, their knowledge of the distribution of Aboriginal art overseas, and in particular in France, isn"t as relevant. Some of these reports recommend that art dealers should benefit more from public funds: they argue that with their knowledge of the art world and their networking capability art dealers would increase Aboriginal art sales overseas. Of course artists and art centres need sales and these sales are the result of strategies developed in partnerships with art dealers and other cultural intermediaries. But if policy makers don"t see the big picture of the international art circulation chainthis could be partly due to the public officers" turn-overhow can they select the art dealers who will receive the funds? Furthermore, the artistic promotion developed by art dealers is motivated by economic choices. The economic rationality influences art dealers to promote certain styles, mainly the ones created by community-based artists, which in return influences the representation of Australian Indigenous cultures overseas. good understanding of the complexity of the Aboriginal art production chain and its circulation within the national territory but their representation of the French network and how Aboriginal art arrives in France is not accurate. Some might object that public officers take such reports as indicators of a tendency of the Aboriginal art world"s infrastructure and not as exhaustive surveys. But with regard to how the sector operates, these reports are actually both symbolic of the dominance of the financial value over the cultural exchange value and vehicles for its reproduction: there are indeed many more export opportunities in France than the ones suggested in the Australian reports. There are several museums with historical and con-temporary Aboriginal art collections and many other non-profit associations who are willing to foster their relations with Aboriginal Australia. But because these agents don"t have the same visibility and the same power to mobilize public funds, they are invisible in public reports. As we know in the field of social sciences, interactions between the art market, public institutions and the civil society can be beneficial, with an increase of knowledge and art sales in return. Artists frequently acknowledge small-independent projects and recognize the values of alternative models of education and art dialogue as a critical counterweight to the expensive art fairs and biennales. In regard to the French export market, it would be interesting to see how Aboriginal artists value these alternative events in regard to the more-traditional commercial exchange setting 3 .
In the process of art commodification, cultural intermediaries play with different values systems to justify their choices and build a highly-valued object. But in the context of the Aboriginal art industry carpetbaggers do not only create values, they impose norms to artists: they influence them to adapt their artistic practices to the liberal work model: they put them in a restricted space, where they will not be bothered by other people's requests; they ask them to paint certain stories, and they also encourage them to share the labour with whoever is available. In that context, Indigenous values such as cultural transmission are partly suppressed from the production sphere. Art dealers are uncomfortable in addressing the issue of fakes and works of poor quality, rendering Aboriginal art an authentic product, unaffected by the issues relating to markets. In other words, they hide to the visitors" eyes Indigenous agency and how artists, individually or collectively, are engaging with different value systems.