The Arts of Primitive Accumulation

In the early 20th century, André Level, a prominent dealer of modern art, recognized a promising venture in African-made artifacts: by elevating them to the status of “high art”, he could create a new market—as J.W. Monroe recounts in Metropolitan Fetish. But if these objects were to generate significant returns, Level needed art critics to legitimize their value. Authenticity became the primary asset of so-called primitive art—the dealer’s authority as an “expert” certified these objects as relics of African antiquity—a tenuous concept. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the masks that arrived in Paris and New York from the colonies were made by African artists for dealers. In this way, African artists could be said to have entered the Euro-American art market as producers of “authentic antiquity”. This panel invites scholars to rethink the “primitive” in primitive accumulation, both historical and ongoing, as it pertains to the relationship between artistic production and market expansion. We welcome papers that engage with this problematic in its formal, historical, and theoretical dimensions, across geographies, periods, and idioms. Historical approaches might trace how capitalist expansion has unfolded in or explained itself through artistic forms, reconstruct the participation of artworks in moral economies, or examine how emerging art markets draw Indigenous makers into capitalist relations. Theoretical contributions may explore modernity’s reliance on fabricated archaisms to stake a claim on value, or analyze the colonial categories, like “the fetish”, through which moral judgements that sustained civilizational hierarchies were transformed into market values.