“What happened to Africa?” an art-world friend asked. “It disappeared.”

In the past few years, Africa is barely there in American museums’ major exhibitions. The same with India. Even China, usually an easier sell, is seen only discreetly.

A lot of new non- Western acquisitions by museums are of contemporary art: dynamic, straight-from-thestudio work, like the glowing wall hangings made of bottle caps by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, and the masks pieced together from gasoline jugs and junked hardware by Romuald Hazoume of Benin.

The pull toward the new is particularly strong in university art history programs, the training grounds of future museum personnel. An overwhelming number of applicants now declare contemporary art their field of choice.

So the situation is that our encyclopedic museums are rarely doing big-idea shows of older non- Western art, and American art historians of the rising generation aren’t studying it these days. (Europe is doing somewhat better on both counts.)

The bottom line: we risk losing both the art and the history in “art history,” particularly where conservational safeguards are fragile or difficult to maintain.

The reasons people pursue careers in newer art are understandable. To an unprecedented degree, contemporary art is now thoroughly tied to and buoyed by the global economy. Not long ago the contemporary market meant Europe and America. Now it also means New Delhi, Beijing and Dubai. New art has become a worldwide industry.

Holders of degrees in contemporary art history can, in greater numbers than ever, become curators, corporate advisers, auction house experts and dealers in a luxury business that has floated above the prevailing economic turbulence. Language requirements are often minimal, English being the global art world lingua franca. And with only the history of today and yesterday to deal with, primary research can be done via Google.

Starting in the 1950s, traditional objects came in a great wave to the United States from Africa, where they were bought, in quantity and at modest prices, by groups of avid amateur collectors. This influx coincided with and encouraged a boom in scholarship.

The flow stopped in the 1980s. The supply of objects that met Western requirements of value - age, evidence of ritual use, beauty of a kind that fit modernist criteria - came to an end. With the new scarcity, prices soared. Private collections went to museums, where they were - and are - occasionally refreshed by new additions.

Major collecting of traditional Asian art ended around the same time, for different reasons. India and China placed their cultural patrimonies in lockdown, where they have stayed, with China now aggressively buying back art from abroad. Even borrowing it has become difficult to impossible.

Small wonder that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other venues have begun to supplement their non-Western holdings with contemporary work .

The shift to new from old in academia has occurred within roughly the same time frame. Some scholars continue to decry presentmindedness. Others take a more positive view: African and Asian cultures, they say, are in states of perpetual transformation. This present is always, instantaneously, the new past. As for museums, they haven’t figured out what to do. Blockbuster-consciousness has them thinking ancient, rare, monumental, expensive, neverseen- before.

But the big question is, why does the direction taken by museums, or by art history as a discipline, have to be an either-or? Traditional or contemporary, old-style or new style . That’s the rhythm of fashion . But writing the history of art shouldn’t work that way. Good artists don’t work that way.

For example, the Indian artist Pushpamala N. , in one photograph, poses as the Hindu goddess Lakshmi as depicted in an early 20th-century painting by Raja Ravi Varma .

Or consider the Chinese conceptualist Ai Weiwei, who is now in police custody in Beijing. He updates museum-quality Neolithic vases by dipping them in candy-colored industrial paint. Or Wangechi Mutu, born in Kenya, now living in New York, whose collages combine, among other things, images of classical African carving and clippings from porn and fashion magazines.

These artists combine old and new in ways that look like nothing seen before. Why not take lessons from them?

Nothing seen before was what a generation of art historians of Africa found and responded to 40 years ago, both on the ground in Africa and in American private collections. Young scholars, many of them students of those historians, are finding the same stimulation in contemporary work.

And now, as the field changes generational hands, it’s crucial to bring both streams into alignment, to start looking again for the new in the traditional (it’s there), and to start locating links to the past in the new (also there).


HOLLAND COTTER
ESSAY