In the 1950s and sixties, a group of Aboriginal people from the Western Desert were resettled by the Australian government in reserves, to be “assimilated” into Australian society. To quote Fred R. Myers, these people

had and still have a rich ceremonial life in which songs, myths, and elaborate body decorations, as well as constructed objects, are combined in performances that reenact the somewhat mysterious events that gave the world its physical form and social order. . . .It was in 1971 at Papunya that a group of Pintupi, Arrernte, Anmatyerre, and Warlpiri men began to turn traditional designs involved in ritual and body decoration and cave painting into a new and partly commoditized form—acrylic paintings on flat surfaces. [p. 2]

Myers was there almost at the beginning and has followed the story of these paintings and the men who make them for over 30 years, into the present. To do justice to the rich, detailed description and penetrating, thoughtful analysis he has made of his experiences is impossible in a brief review, so I will just suggest some of the many topics debated in social science analyses of art that he has clarified.

Do non-Western artists make their works with an aesthetic intention? Myers settles this much-debated issue with data. He documented hundreds of consecutive paintings made by the same artists over a period of two years and shows how the artists experimented with forms and designs in the same way Western artists do in the name of aesthetics.

Myers takes seriously the increasingly common idea that the making of artworks involves more people than the painter alone and shows in great detail the sometimes cooperative, sometimes conflictual arrangements through which the work gets done. In this case, he focuses particularly on the networks of government officials, art bureaucrats, art dealers, and collectors who jointly collaborated to create a market for objects that eventually came to have considerable value.

Myers emphasizes the important role played by the state, in a way that goes far beyond the usual clichés. In this case, a left-wing government found it useful, and compatible with its larger aims, to put money into the programs that supported the painters. Later, a conservative government found the painters and their work useful as a symbol of a new Australian identity that could be advertised during the 2000 Olympic Games.

Myers shows that a painting is not a stable object about which one can theorize. Not at all. It is many different objects, depending on the situation it is found in, who does what with it, and who makes what of it. The most dramatic shift in the meaning of an Aboriginal acrylic painting is the change from a (more or less) ritual object that embodies the painter’s ownership of territories in the desert, and whose authenticity in this regard is what gives the painting value, to an example of contemporary Australian art, valuable for its display of aesthetic qualities highly regarded in worldwide contemporary art circles. Myers avoids the trap of trying to decide which one of these (or the several other possibilities he discusses) the painting really is and accepts that it will be different things at different times and in different organizational settings.

There is more, a lot more. This is a big book, filled with detailed descriptions and histories, maybe more than would interest someone who does not have a particular interest in Australian Aboriginal life. But the book delivers on its implicit promise to make it worth one’s while to learn about all of that background and pays off in a deep understanding of how art gets to be art. This is an understanding that can be profitably transported to other times, places, and kinds of art.

A minor quibble from a sociologist. Myers seems to think that sociology consists of Pierre Bourdieu. He would have found, and may still find, that the works of many other sociologists have something quite compatible to offer to his analytic approach. For starters, I mention Raymonde Moulin’s study of the value-making activities that constitute the French art market and Richard Peterson’s and David Grazian’s studies of the problem of artistic authenticity, in U.S. country-and country and -western music in the one case and in Chicago blues clubs in the other.

Most of all, Myers’s book shows that there is just no substitute for solid fieldwork.