EUROCENTRISM IN ART Zeenat Javaid 12CMO When you think of classical art, the art that we go to museums for, the art that we learn about in school and what we’re told to admire, notice that much of it is of European origin. I’m going to preface this article by clarifying that by no means do I aim to undermine the importance of traditional and contemporary Western art, I simply want people to question the reason why they think it is so respectable (in comparison to historical art of other cultures, of course). There seems to be an open appreciation in many people for the life-like sculptures of greek and roman renaissance greats, the ‘David’ and the ‘Birth of Venus’, seen as absolute masterpieces and the pinnacle of technical art, whereas ancient Japanese printmaking or the gorgeous calligraphy of the Islamic world are often overlooked as topics of interest when it comes to art. I personally am guilty of this bias in various ways, growing up I would always yearn for my art to be as great as the Mona Lisa, or ‘the last supper’ but never cared much for Tinga Tinga paintings made by the artists in Uganda around me, I frankly didn’t think it was ‘real art’. I think that this is because I was almost fed a narrative that respectable art lives in Museums, and the art of the real people wouldn’t be there, as well as the fact that I likely also just respected realism in art as an inexperienced artist. However, I was never taught that African Tribal masks or Indonesian Batik was equally as important to the art world as stone sculpture was; oil painting consumed my early life as an artist and to this day, a small part of me still holds on to this idea that my ‘traditional’ Europe - centred skills, are of more importance than my other skills, I have had to personally pull myself out of this narrow focus to widen my own horizons. We must consider what we assign to the meaning of ‘skilled’ or
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‘technical’ art in the first place, and why do we value it more than we value the work of carpet weavers from Iran;
Why is it that in academic art, we are taught the methods that focus mostly on one place in the world, who gets to decide that classical painting is a ‘important’ art and that weaving is not? The issue is furthered by the fact that it is ingrained into schooling, even higher art education places a heavy focus on ‘technical’ or European historical, skills being a necessity in developing artists, with exploration of other styles coming as a sort of afterthought, or as many like to put it, ‘experimentation’. Whilst schools will never limit their pupils to studying only the works of European masters, there is a massive underlying emphasis on their principles, passed through years and years of schooling, unbeknownst to the institutions themselves. Now for the sake of argument, let’s say that the reason that schools teach the aforementioned principles is because European art was historically the most realistic and technical, and technical skills (as defined by European representational standards) are the foundation of great art; but what if I told you that the Ancient West african Yoruba Civilisation had been making astonishingly detailed and realistic works of art for centuries, their sculptures and busts dating back over 800 years. Or the extremely realistic portrait vessels of the Moche Culture of South America, which existed from
