http://blog.art21.org/2009/07/06/the-value-of-didactic-art-and-the-gift-economy%e2%80%94from-object-ownership-to-object-affiliation/ The Official Blog of Art21, Inc. and the <i>Art in the Twenty-First Century</i> PBS series Fri, 17 May 2013 17:30:01 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 http://blog.art21.org/2009/07/06/the-value-of-didactic-art-and-the-gift-economy%e2%80%94from-object-ownership-to-object-affiliation/comment-page-1/#comment-12406 Adelheid Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:43:31 +0000 http://blog.art21.org/?p=5968#comment-12406 nope, not at all. This is from the more academic version of the above: “Alfred Gell discusses the kula ceremonial exchange chains that have been described in anthropological literature since the 1920s. Gell does not fall into drab psychological metaphor (the gift circle as the ego) like Lewis Hyde in “The Gift”, but uniquely speaks about the transformation of an object into a ‘field of influence’ along its path of travel between Kula operators. At each stop it both receives and imparts status and gives rise to social negotiation. Gell holds that “[t]he pith of my argument is that there is isomorphy of structure between the cognitive processes we know (from inside) as ‘consciousness’ and the spatio-temporal structures of distributed objects in the artefactual realm.” Thus, “[a]ncestral shrines, tombs, memorials, ossuaries, sacred sites, etc. all have to do with the extension of personhood beyond the confines of biological life via indexes distributed in the milieu.” In fact “it may not be so aberrant to suggest that what persons are externally (and collectively) is a kind of enlarged replication of what they are internally.” This dynamic reading attracts me.”

]]> http://blog.art21.org/2009/07/06/the-value-of-didactic-art-and-the-gift-economy%e2%80%94from-object-ownership-to-object-affiliation/comment-page-1/#comment-12397 Auggi Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:15:07 +0000 http://blog.art21.org/?p=5968#comment-12397 LEWIS HYDE Bitches.

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