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Article: Benign exoticism: Lucian Harris visits the Victoria and Albert Museum's 'Encounters exhibition, which charts the aesthetic consequences of the meeting between East and West from 1500 to 1800.
- Article from:
- Apollo
- Article date:
- November 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Apollo Magazine Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Staging 'Encounters: The meeting of Europe and Asia 1500-1800' is a brave move by the Victoria and Albert Museum. An exhibition covering three centuries of cross cultural history, spanning two continents, and offering no single coherent group of objects, does not make for easy packaging. Unlike the museum's recent blockbusters, such as 'Gothic' and 'Art Deco', which focused on familiar phases of domestic culture, 'Encounters' is a tale of life on the periphery, of small communities far from home, of taste for the strange and exotic.
The challenge of presenting such an obscure and academic subject might easily have been answered with the kind of long didactic text ...