In 1994 I entitled a pot Tribal Artefact for the Chattering Classes. I had been to see an exhibition of African tribal sculpture and had come away envious of the central role these artefacts had in those societies. I yearned for the authenticity and tradition that nurtured and cradled these artists. At that time as an artist I felt marginalised – art in the West felt to me like a luxury add-on. I was comforting myself with the idea that perhaps after all I did have a tribe that cherished my output. Since then I have come to realise there is a clan to which I belong, the contemporary-art tribe.

I have been thinking about art in ethnographic terms because opening this week at the Bargehouse Gallery on the South Bank is an exhibition of works by Australian Aboriginal artists called Raark-London. Raark is the name for the crosshatched patterns distinctive to these works by Kuninjku artists based around the arts centre at Maningrida, which is on the coast of the Northern Territory.

The leader of this group is John Mawurndjul, probably Australia’s highest-profile living artist, having had a major retrospective at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, a large installation in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and having appeared on the cover of Time magazine. His paintings are made with natural earthy pigments on treated bark. They have developed from figurative depictions of spirits and ancestral beings in animal form derived from ancient rock art to being almost abstract. This form of painting is inextricably entwined with the politics of land rights and one was even presented in what was to become known as the bark petition to the Australian Parliament in 1963 by the Yolngu people in a protest at their ancestral land being taken over by a bauxite mine.

Art by Aborigines became very fashionable in the 1980s. It had many attractions: it was decorative, and had a strong authentic ethnic look easily adapted into T-shirts and tourist souvenirs. Originals could be collected to enhance Australian identity or assuage colonial guilt. Consequently, because of the boom the core of genuinely vital works was watered down by a flood of production-line paintings and fakes. It still has enduring appeal to anyone wanting to flaunt their sympathy with eco-spirituality.

Modern Western artists ripped off ethnographic art 100 years ago, when Picasso painted African masks and Klee showed the influence of X-ray bark painting from Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. In the past few decades indigenous artists and their dealers, hoping to shrug off the economic and status limitations of being regarded as a niche curiosity, flock to the lucrative Western contemporary-art village. Mawurndjul has been visiting for 20 years; he has been to the grand tribal gathering of the Venice Biennale and is attracted to the role of a great artist and the respect it is given.

With its well-developed validation process and huge economy the contemporary-art tribe is pretty powerful. It is understandable that other tribes would like a piece of the action. If they are going to become part of this tribe, they need to learn its ways and language. Some groups expect the tribe to change to accommodate them. Crafts people often ask: “Why are we not taken seriously as contemporary artists?” Yet they do not fully enter the culture of the village to be judged on its values.

Others make more effort. Asian artists have studied the ways of our conceptual-art witchdoctors and we are starting to see a maturing Eastern contemporary-art scene.

Aborigines are very protective over the use of their images and identity. The artist Wandjuk Marika appealed to Gough Whitlam, the Australian Prime Minister at the time, for help in framing copyright of sacred images after seeing one of his paintings reproduced on a teatowel. The 81-year-old white Australian painter Elizabeth Durack provoked outrage by entering competitions of Aboriginal art pretending that her work was by a fictional indigenous alter ego called Eddie Burrup.

Authenticity is very important to these artists, but the main source of it is the collective and historical culture rather than the authenticity bestowed by connoisseurs on an individual original artist. Aboriginal art seems to make the move from outback to art museum look easy as the works, unlike, say, folk costumes or pottery, are mainly in the form of the best-established format in Western art, ie, painting. But I do not think it is straightforward. How I, as an ageing spear-carrier in the contemporary-art tribe, view the works of the Kuninjku artists is, as we traditionally say, problematic. I am prompted to stand up for my tribe’s territorial rights. The values of contemporary art are aesthetically and intellectually complex and have been refined through a long history of challenges and movements. Aboriginal art, whose value derives from a traditional folklore context, cannot just transfer that value into the more lucrative and far-reaching arena of contemporary art without having to work with and be judged on fine-art criteria. Without the frisson of clashing cultures and ritual function, I am left with flat brown patterns and simple images in neat crosshatching. If I look at these paintings and wooden sculptures stripped of their aura of exotic otherness, if I imagine that they are by someone who grew up in a humdrum middle-class suburb, they start to look a bit lifeless, a bit routine.

So, for me, as examples of authentic Aboriginal art, these works are OK; as anthropology, I think they are interesting; as contemporary art, I find them uninspiring.

— Raark-London is at the Bargehouse Gallery, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, SE1 (020-7401 2255), from Friday until Oct 7

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