In this research paper I will analyze a comprehensive art collection and the interpretation of

African objects within it. My goal is to show that art from Africa is typically rendered in a

fictional context of mythological stasis while Western art is represented as historically

dynamic. In short, I believe the two forms are made to exist in different ideological spaces:

Western displays foster a very specific relation to global history; and African art is left floating

above such painful interpretations, in an unchanging realm of Absolutes. To show this

I have randomly selected four rooms of Western art from the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine

Arts and analyzed the historic contextualization of each piece they contain. I then compare

the average Western contextualization to the displays in the African room. Finally, I have

chosen a Yorubian piece from the collection and re-interpreted it in light of its fundamental

historic and aesthetic reality: a prototype for ahistorical museums to follow.