Keywords
Agency
Anthropological theory
Art
Theory of action
How to Cite
Abstract
This article dialogues with the theoretical arguments of Alfred Gell's book Art and Agency. It is suggested that Gell, while emphatically upholding an action-oriented perspective, diverts attention from human agency by attributing agency to objects. It is argued that the very properties of art that Gell excludes from his definition of an art object and, to a large extent, from his analysis - aesthetic and semantic - are essential for understanding art as a way of acting in the world and the impact that works of art have on people.
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