In 1923 and 1935 two New York museums entered the debate on the artistic qualities of African Art by mounting major exhibits on the subject, and by using the terms and arguments of art history to make a case for the aesthetic importance of particular African objects. The exhibits employed very different methods, however, and their divergent approaches to this subject reveal not only a shift in the art museum's interaction with non-Western art, but an epistemological shift in the conception of the art museum. The ways in which these exhibits, and the reactions to them, framed and conceptualized African art reveal a great deal about the general system of objects constituted by the art museum, and about the formulation and interaction of the concepts art and the museum during this period. (p. 262)

CONTENTS
The Brooklyn Museum: early history.
The museum of modern art: early history.
Primitive Negro art: the Brooklyn museum, 1923.
African Negro art: The museum of modern art, 1935.
Reactions to the exhibit: African Negro Art.
Reorganization at the Brooklyn Museum.
Temporality and the aesthetic judgment.
Conclusion.
Notes [ include bibliographic references].