One of the speakers at Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, tonvergence the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA) hosted by The University of Melbourne was Dr. Philip Batty, Senior Curator of Central Australian Collections at Museum Victoria. He is co-founder in 1980 of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) and was Director of the National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (Tandanya) in Adelaide from 1991 to 1993. His paper was entitled A Fine Romance: White Money, Black Art. There is an online version here. (Jan 2008)

My interest is what Batty says about this kind of work. He saddresses it in terms of the cross cultural rather than primitivism or modernism. He says that:

In this paper, I argue that Aboriginal art is neither a black or white thing, but a 'cross-cultural' phenomenon. Driven by a heavily mediated dialogue between its white consumers and black producers, I also argue that this intensive trans-cultural conversation shapes the form, content and the meaning of Aboriginal art. While the spending power of whites and the economic needs of blacks has played a fundamental role in generating and maintaining this dialogue, I would prefer to characterise it in gentler terms: as a kind of cross-cultural romance, in which the respective partners remain attached to each other through a mutually beneficial web of illusion and fantasy.

While Aboriginal artists are certainly positioned in discrete cultural enclosures, such positioning can be seen as an outcome of their relationship with their white audience, as can the general production of Aboriginal art. In other words, while the cultural differences separating Aboriginal artists from their spectators is a necessary requirement in the production of Aboriginal art, such separations and enclosures are mutually constructed through a complex interplay between the two, and are not only temporary, but subject to continuous modification.