This is the first anthology to chronicle the global critical reception of Aboriginal art since the early 1980s, when the art world began to understand it as contemporary art. Featuring 96 authors--including art critics and historians, curators, art center co-ordinators and managers, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and novelists--it conveys a diversity of thinking and approaches. Together with editor Ian McLean's substantial introductory essay and epilogue, the anthology argues for a reevaluation of Aboriginal art's critical intervention into contemporary art since its seduction of the art world a quarter-century ago.

Ian McLean is a well-known commentator on Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian art and the intersection of Indigenous and settler cultures. He is the author of The Art of Gordon Bennett and White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art. He is a member of the Advisory Council of Third Text, and professor of Australian art history at the University of Wollongong.

How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: Writings on Aboriginal Contemporary Art is part of the four-book series Australian Studies in Art and Art Theory and is published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation and the Nelson Meers Foundation.