Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory

Gell, Alfred

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0198280149 ISBN 13: 9780198280149

Casa editrice: Oxford University Press, 1998

In Art and Agency, Alfred Gell formulates an anthropological theory of visual art that focuses on the social context of art production, circulation, and reception. As a theory of the nexus of social relations involving works of art, this work suggests that in certain contexts, art-objects substitute for persons and thus mediate social agency. Diversely illustrated and based on European, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian sources, Art and Agency was completed just before Gell's death at the age of fifty-one in January 1997. It embodies the intellectual bravura, lively wit, vigor, and erudition for which he was admired, and will stand as an enduring testament to one of the most gifted anthropologists of his generation.

Recensione:

This book changes the very basis of the way art has been viewed in the human sciences. It presents what is the first fundamental theory for an anthropology of art. Its publication is a major event. (Maurice Bloch, FBA, Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics.)

This is a remarkable work ... witty, elegant, broad in its compass and scintillating in its detail. It is characteristically polemical ... alive with his sense of purpose and his quite original and captivating account of how we are captivated by relations between forms ... The book know what to do with the limits of form―one suddenly sees how anthropology might surpass itself. (Marilyn Strathern, FBA, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)

An extraordinary achievement. Gell offers a profound new understanding of collective agency which completely reshapes the anthropology of art, redefines its objects of study, and inspires new conclusions. (Caroline Humphrey, Reader in Asian Anthropology, University of Cambridge)

L'autore:

Alfred Gell is a former Reader in Anthropology in the London School of Economics.