The Australian Indigenous Art Commission (AIAC) in the Musée du quai Branly (MqB), Paris, (2006) saw the integration of Australian Indigenous art into a spectacular new museum. The AIAC played a significant role, it could be argued, in both promoting non-European world views into the heart of Paris, as well as providing visual evidence to support the French government argument that the new museum would provoke a radical rethinking of the display and interpretation of non-European cultural objects. Although much of the serious discourse on the Branly project has centred on debates about the display of the collections within changing views of ethnography, art and museums, the bold architectural embrace of Aboriginal art as public art, embedded within the fabric of the building, has ensured that at least contemporary Aboriginal art is recognised as high art (not just cultural artefact) by the European market.

One can think of the art in an ethnographic museum, (the AIAC in the MqB), as a kind of contact zone. Pratt defined the "contact zone" as; "the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations", often grounded within "conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict".[1]  The conjunction of ethnography and art, Europe and Oceania, and France and Aboriginal Australia in the AIAC hopefully sidesteps such associations. It has, however, sparked a debate - or at least declarative positions – between ethnographers and art writers.

The enthusiasm greeting the architecture and the public art from their constituent communities has not been replicated by the ethnographic discourse with regards to the display of the collections. In attempting to differentiate historians from anthropologists, anthropologist Clifford Geertz used the metaphor of "muralists and miniaturists" – historians pursuing a broad sweep of thought versus anthropologists detailing a nuanced "feel" of everyday life.[2] Can the different kinds of responses be accounted for in terms of art and science?, the personal expressive gesture versus the purposeful specific artefact?, in a word, muralist versus miniaturist? Do the responses reveal antagonistic or simply oblique disciplinary paradigms with regard to the image? In addressing these questions, the authors will focus especially on the critical responses to the AIAC.