In James Clifford's essay, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," the appearance of tribal art(ifacts), some grouped with modern art, in several museum galleries comes under fire. He very critically addresses such museum's attempts to classify and reclassify primitive art and modern art into one by pointing out only vague similarities. Clifford also highly objects to one museum's, the Museum of Modern Art, use of the word 'affinity' in a gallery held in 1984 entitled, "Primitivism in 20th Century Art." The driving force behind this essay is that the status of tribal artifacts has been forced to shift and deviate from their original classification as remnants of an ancient past with anthropological definitions, to those with more modern, aesthetic definitions.

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) exasperated Clifford on numerous levels. Their 1984 gallery, "Primitivism in 20th Century Art," coupled so-called tribal artifacts with modern works in order to show a correlation between the two. In particular, the word affinity was used, meaning a "deeper or more natural relationship than mere resemblance or juxtaposition." Clifford felt that MOMA incorrectly represented this word; he said the e

Although Clifford is very critical of much of the primitive and modern art mingling, he did mange to find a few exhibits that impressed him. The collection and presentation of pieces at the Musee de l'Homme, the "African Masterpieces" catalogue especially, implies that they are art aficionados there because the "taxonomic split between art and artifact is thus healed entirely in the terms of aesthetic code." This museum appears to be one with ethnographic specimens, but they were never labeled as such, just presented for what they were. Another show which was running in New York had been made much more discernible. Te Maori established that the art displayed was still sacred and on loan from several museums, but also from the Maori people themselves. They exploited their traditions as art to aid in a current resurgence in New Zealand. This situation was the same for Asante leaders in the Museum of Natural History. All of these examples given by Clifford seem to do with the tribal objects presented in a very historical and unbiased fashion. We may have found something that Clifford actually likes... amazing.

xhibition was an intriguing but problematic exercise in formal coalescence. An example of MOMA's misuse of the term was on the catalogue's cover, which fe

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Approximate Word count = 854
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)