Critic's notebook: In New York, the Met looks at African art with new eyes

NEW YORK -- African art rarely thrives in the Western art museum. It hovers uncertainly between the beautiful or intriguing object and the ethnographic specimen. Exhibitions are relatively infrequent, so audiences have little opportunity to develop the right receptors, and base knowledge, to make sense of it. In the early years of the last century, Alfred Stieglitz's famed 291 gallery presented an exhibition that was typical of the condescension it elicited: "Statuary in Wood by Negro Savages" w...