CHARLES MUDEDE: Every time I walk into a major museum in America or Europe and come across the African art section, my heart panics, and I want to run away from the nightmare gallery of monsters with big teeth, mothers with big tits, mammals with reptilian bodies. Everything in the African art section is so crude, so rudimentary. I wonder why Westerners admire and collect these incomprehensible figures, these fetishes with a thousand nails driven into them, these dead animals hanging on hideous-looking oracle gowns.

African art is not for Africans, but for Westerners. There is no such thing as African art in Africa. Only when a Westerner shows up with Forex [Foreign Exchange--U.S. dollars, British pounds, and so on] in hand do these devils who make up African art appear. But the moment the Westerner turns his back, African art disappears.

EMILY HALL: It was impossible to walk through the galleries and simply enjoy the work. You have to reckon with a sense of guilt at your own white ignorance, and anyone who says otherwise is lying. Bringing you, my black African friend, was my trump card. It freed me a little.

Is it telling that you were horrified by the work, while I was guilty and clinical about it? Is that because you're African? I'm looking at these things as a curiosity, and I'm quite separate from it. And although I found many of the masks and the robes and the statues beautiful and compelling, I got a strong whiff of Orientalism about it all--in the sense of foreign-as-exotic, so perhaps Africanoiserie would be the right [invented] term. That these are things we shouldn't be looking at, and that we might ruin them by looking at them. Like the Masai beaded necklaces, whose colors used to have specific meanings embedded in them, but have been emptied of meaning since the Masai gave it up to create pretty combinations for tourists.

For the record, we should say that we looked at the exhibition without the benefit of the audio tour, without which we were almost helpless--since this show eschews any kind of wall tag.

CM: The exhibition is not entirely lost: The modern art from West Africa is exciting. These works rose from the minds of real individuals, not from the depths of an anonymous nightmare. Those marvelous photographs by Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe, the elegant vases by Magdalene Odundo (as smooth and as beautiful as the soapstone sculptures of John Takawira, the late Zimbabwean artist), and of course the wonderful classical European clothes made with kente fabric by Yinka Shonibare. A distinct human personality is at work in these pieces. The ancient masks and statues are impersonal and dead serious; none of them have the humor and sensitivity of Shonibare's work. His designs are funny and also done with excellent taste.

It's truly regrettable the monsters from the past dominated the exhibition. The monsters were having a ball, and the more interesting, more beautiful works were hiding in the corners worried about what would happen to them when night fell and the museum was closed. Could you imagine spending the night in the African art section? I would rather suffer a night in King County Jail.

EH: I found that my discomfort evaporated when I looked at the contemporary work--when you look at it, it looks back at you. That is to say, looking at them doesn't feel like plundering. In fact, Shonibare's piece--and I agree, it's the best thing in the show--seems to be about that very thing, how the act of looking is a kind of colonialism.

CM: Precisely, and this is what makes Shonibare's Diary of a Victorian Dandy [which is not in this exhibit], a collection of photographs set in conventional 19th-century bourgeoisie spaces, so forceful. Africans have a gaze too, and in Shonibare's photographs that gaze is turned to the West, to its fantasies and obsessions, all played out in noble rooms, libraries, and whorehouses.

EH: Why do you think Diary of a Victorian Dandy wasn't included? Because it doesn't contribute to a soothing anthropological vision of Africa that is safe for a museum?

CM: Oh God, no, it doesn't.