The styles of Eric Michaels

Something I have found constantly enticing about Eric Michaels' work is that it is often very specific in its local and particular detail while refusing to add up to anything like an explicit 'position' on more global matters. Still less is there a 'grand theory' either of culture in general or of the specific Aboriginal practices and people in which Eric Michaels took so much interest. The point of the present analysis is to see whether it is possible to trace this double shuffle between local specificity and global indeterminacy in Michaels' 'styles', in the concrete textual specifics of his writing. As a case in point, I will turn to his paper 'Bad Aboriginal Art'. \n \nIn some ways this is a bad choice; it gives the game away within its own pages, albeit towards the very end. There, in the penultimate paragraph, it becomes clear that definite aesthetic judgments about Aboriginal art cannot be made in terms of the 'authenticity' or 'tradition' craved by many white and/or Eurocentric art experts. The paper, up to that point, is an unsuccessful attempt to track down empirical, ethnographically grounded, examples of what could count as 'bad' art in the context of Western desert painting practices. The rationale is that the category of 'good art' is routinely unavailable without a counterpart

Art · Linguistics · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• Understanding interaction in central Australia

  Kenneth Liberman•Understanding interaction in…•1985

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• Writing Culture

  K Fortun, James Clifford et al.•Writing Culture•1986

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• Studies in ethnomethodology

  Harold Garfinkel•Studies in ethnomethodology•1984

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• The Post Card

  Jacques Derrida, Alan Bass•The post card•1987

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