Goddess with a Picasso face: Art markets,collectors and sacred things in the circulation of Korean shaman paintings

Abstract

In the well-known story of how ‘primitive art’ came to be recognized as such, things once regarded as sacred or empowered circulate as art collected for reasons far removed from their original intention. In the case of Korean shaman paintings, the authors interpret this process as a kind of ‘purification’ in Bruno Latour’s sense, a translation and transformation of old practices (paintings as the seats of gods) into things that are deployed in acceptably modern ways (paintings as art commodities). The authors recognize, also following Latour, that this is necessarily an incomplete and unstable process. Their discussion assumes two parallel purifications, a discursive purification that recuperates the paintings as art market commodities and a more literal purification by shamans when, in particular circumstances, they deem it appropriate to release paintings to the art market. The authors are concerned with both thickening and broadening the discussion of art market circulation: thickening, by showing how, within a particular history in a particular place, at some distance from Paris or New York, things once sacred came to be revalued as ‘art’. They broaden the discussion by setting it among collectors and dealers in South Korea and thus outside the familiar dichotomy of the West and the rest that has heretofore organized discussions of the commodification and circulation of once sacred goods. A seemingly familiar story about art markets and the social life of things unfolds within the unfamiliar context of an alternative or Other modernity.