2 EDITORIAL The mayhem of the US election was not the only thing going on in Washington, DC, the week of November 8. On the tenth of that month, the Association of Art Museum Curators held a panel discussion at the National Museum of African Art on the subject of unintended bias in the museum community, with implications ranging from lack of diversity among museum trustees, staff, and audiences to exclusionary practices of collecting, display, and interpretation. While this was an event largely intended for museum professionals, it represents an increasing trend of self-refl ection on the part of these institutions regarding the very role of museums vis-à-vis the art in their collections. A more public example of this is an exhibition currently at the Landesmuseum in Hannover titled Heikles Erbe: Koloniale Spuren bis in die Gegenwart (A Delicate Legacy: Colonial Traces in Modern Times), which seeks to make sense of its colonial collection in a post-colonial era of modern museology. While well intended and important, such refl ection sometimes begins to parallel the perspective held by some archaeologists, in which an object’s status as art is secondary— often far secondary—to its importance as artifact, that is, something that is a marker for a particular point of time and development in a particular culture. The very notion of art is questioned in this context. Obviously, this is a very complex issue, but to me, the heart of the discussion lies in the intent of the people who created the works in question. Were they making artifacts to mark culture or were they making art, albeit not necessarily art that is fully in line with our contemporary defi nitions? The overwhelming majority of the art objects that we address here are rooted in the sacred, and although they may not conform to contemporary art defi nitions, few would hesitate to question the artistry of analogous Judeo-Christian objects—a sanguineous Spanish crucifi x, an elaborate silver Torah crown, or a beautifully calligraphic Koran, to take just a few examples. The major difference lies in where the objects originate. Origin lies at the heart of another discussion that is ongoing within many museums. These have an uneasy relationship with collectors, even though an ongoing debt is owed to the latter for enriching institutional collections. Paris’ Musée du Quai Branly (which now has offi cially appended the name of its major patron, Jacques Chirac, onto its own) is wrestling with the very idea of private collectors as it presents an exhibition showcasing the small but exquisite collection of French billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière. Such distance between collectors and institutions is a recent construct. To name an example explored in these pages, the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen spent nearly half a century carefully cultivating a relationship with Carl and Amalie Kjersmeier, an effort that resulted in its acquisition through bequest in 1968 of one of the fi nest African art collections in private hands at the time. Some of this material had been fi eld collected—as was the “Baga” serpent in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art—which did not pose a problem at the time, though today there is good reason for institutions to be circumspect about recently removed cultural material. The museums that we have today are constructs of the Enlightenment, founded on ideas of public benefi t and cultural education yet rooted in the Wunderkammers of the Renaissance nobility. Some, like the Landesmuseum, are repositories for the cultural trophies of colonialism. There is good reason to consider the implications of the content and presentation of such collections, but, in the end, is it such a bad thing to simply appreciate and enjoy the remarkable artworks that they hold? Jonathan Fogel Our cover shows a Bamana dance crest, sogoni koun or chi wara, collected by Carl Kjersmeier in the village of Sulubua, Burkina Faso, in 1932. Wood, red fi ber. H: 55.9 cm. Ex Kjersmeier Collection; Lau Sunde, Copenhagen; Steen Strömberg; Ole Christensen; Sotheby´s, New York, May 19, 2000. Photo © Sotheby´s. The photo behind is a detail of the Kjersmeiers’ living room showing a number of their Bamana dance crests. Private collection.
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