I have just stumbled upon Before Pangaea: New Essays in Transcultural Aesthetics published in Literature and Aesthetics (Dec 2005), the journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. These are the the papers from the Second Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics in 2004.

These papers undermine the conservative view that the only art worthy of the name was Western art—in particular Western art since the Renaissance, with the addition of selected works from Greece and Rome and Christiandom. They start from the view that art for the West encompassed objects from the four corners of the earth and from cultures stretching back to the dawn of prehistory.

The painting tells the story of an important rain making ceremony to invoke the elements. The circle depicts the waterhole. The U shapes are the corroboree men and the dotting represents body paint used in ceremonies. Kalipinpa water dreaming is a powerful storm creating the lightning, thunderclouds, rain and hail and sending its deluge to rejuvenate the earth, filling rockholes, claypans and creeks. It has the power to create new life and growth upon the land.

Accepting this as art---as we do---means that we live with the notion of a ‘universal world of art’—a ‘transcultural’ world of art’. Fifty years ago this work would not have been allowed across the threshold of an art gallery. So we are living in the aftermath of an aesthetic revolution.

We live in a world in which the scope of the term art, and the very meaning of the term has undergone a
radical change. So we can talk in terms of an aesthetic revolution that is more significant than modernism and abstract art.