Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art

The Invention of Art: A Cultural History by the American philosopher and art historian Larry Shiner was published in 2001. This post is a synopsis without comment. Blockquotes are Shiner’s own text. These notes are not a substitute for reading the book... which is a must-read.

The Invention of Art is a history of how society has conceived of art and artists, arguing that the category of ‘fine art’ and the conceptual division between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ appeared between roughly 1680-1830 as a result of powerful social transformations brought about by the onset of capitalism (he never quite puts it that way, though he comes close on pp76-7).

Shiner was inspired by Paul Kristeller’s essay ‘The Modern System of the Arts’ (in Renaissance Thought and the Arts, 1980) which showed that the category of ‘fine art’ did not exist before the 18th century. He expands and updates that thesis in his own book.

There is a 2014 interview with Larry Shiner here: https://platypus1917.org/2014/06/01/art-modern-phenomenon-interview-larry-shiner/

Synopsis

The Invention of Art is divided into an Introduction and five parts.

Introduction

Today you can call virtually anything ‘art’. Shiner asks: where does our modern system of art come from? The contemporary European view of art – ‘autonomous works meant for aesthetic contemplation’ (p4) – is a historical construction that is only 200 years old. Assuming our view is universal, we often hang ‘works’ (e.g. Native American artefacts) in galleries, out of their proper context, to make them fit our own notions.

• Our word ‘art’ is derived from Latin ars and Greek techne which refer to any human craft performed with skill and grace: art as construction. The opposite of human art was Nature. This ancient view lasted over 2000 years.
• A division occurred in the 18th century. A new, prestigious category of ‘fine arts’ (poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, music) was newly opposed to crafts/popular arts (e.g. shoemaking, embroidery, storytelling, popular songs). 
• Fine arts were about inspiration and genius, and enjoyed as refined pleasure.
• Crafts were about skills and rules, and made for usefulness/entertainment.
• Nowadays we drop the ‘fine’ and simply think of ‘art’ as ‘fine art’.
• Before the 18th century, ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’ were interchangeable and ‘artist’ could mean a shoemaker, chemist etc. There were only artisan/artists who made objects in accordance with their skill or craft. Now the two were separated and opposed.
• Similarly, there was a separation of refined contemplative pleasure (the ‘aesthetic’) from ordinary pleasure in the useful or entertaining. 
• M.H. Abrams called this (after Kant) a ‘Copernican revolution’ in the conception of art (Doing Things With Texts, 1989). 

Thus we have three divisions: art from craft, artist from artisan, aesthetic pleasure from ordinary pleasure. This was a significant break (arguably ‘a fracture we have been trying to heal ever since’, p9) that replaced an entire system of ‘concepts, practices and institutions’ with another. The old system did not make the same divisions between the arts, crafts and sciences:

• Art was any object or performance for use or diversion. 
• Artists were not divided from artisans.
• Most artisan/artists worked on commission, making contextual works for patrons who often specified materials and content.
• Art was often cooperatively produced, e.g. painters’ workshops, playwriting collaborations, composers borrowing melodies.

By contrast, Shiner neatly sums up the new normal:

The ideal is not inventive collaboration but individual creation, where works are seldom meant for a specific place or purpose but exist for themselves, where the separation of art works from a functional context leads to the ideal of silent and reverential attention in concert halls, art museums, theatres, and reading rooms. (p7)

This ‘modern’ system has dominated Europe and America since the early 19th century. Its assumptions are tied up with power relations of class, sex and race, and its new concepts go hand-in-hand with new practices and institutions (such as canons, museums, copyright, etc).

The various elements of the modern system came together during the ‘long 18th century’ of 1680-1830. Bits of this process followed different paths and timescales, e.g. the term ‘aesthetic’ was established in Germany much earlier than in France and Britain, and there were of course continuities with the old system. But:

Prior to the eighteenth century neither the modern ideas of fine art, artist and aesthetic nor the set of practices and institutions we associate with them were integrated into a normative system, whereas after the eighteenth century, the major conceptual polarities and institutions of the modern system of art were largely taken for granted and have been regulative ever since. Only after the modern system of art was established as an autonomous realm could one ask “Is it really art?” or, “What is the relation of ‘art’ to ‘society’?” (p14)

From the beginning this system has been resisted, and while it has largely assimilated the resistance and occasionally expanded to include new types of art, today it is being constantly undermined, even actively struggled against.

Shiner contrasts his historical approach to art with more essentialist views like that of Arthur Danto, who in After the End of Art (1997) claims that modern ideas of fine art are universal and their emergence inevitable. On that view, art and craft are eternally separate and it just took us time to realise it; in the wake of modernism, art has gradually revealed its essence and its historical phase therefore is now over.

Part I: Before Fine Art and Craft

People in the past treated art and artists differently. There are scattered comments that resemble modern views, but we should not overestimate their significance. 

Ancients

The Greeks had no word for ‘fine art’. The Greek techne and Latin ars referred to ‘the human ability to make and perform’ such as carpentry, poetry, shoemaking, medicine, etc. The ancient Greeks and Romans did not group painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music into a distinct category. For Aristotle, the artisan/artist takes a raw material, uses a set of ideas or rules to produce a product (tragedy, shoes, etc). There is a category of ‘mimetic’ or imitative arts but it is not methodologically different. Every techne works the same way. There is a hierarchy (statues are more admired than sandals) but not a polarity.

Literature was a broad category for written learning, not just creative writing. The most prestigious form was poetry, but without our Romantic overtones.

There was a late Hellenistic/Roman division of arts into liberal (intellectual, highborn) vs vulgar/servile (physical labour, payment). But:

• This was still not a division by discipline, e.g. the theory of music was liberal (valued for being close to mathematics) whereas performing music for pay was vulgar.
• Liberal ‘arts’ like poetry and music were still grouped with ‘arts’ like grammar or mathematics.

The ancient view of the artist was much closer to the artisan: grasp of principles, skill, grace. An ‘art’ was a discipline, nearer to what we call ‘sciences’. Aristotle emphasised trained, rational making but the ancients also allowed for supple understanding. Ancient practitioners were neither artisans nor artists but artisan/artists; there is little interest in imagination/originality/autonomy. The aristocracy could admire fine work while still looking down their noses at artisan/artists as mere manual workers:

Despite passages in Pliny or Cicero that show a greater respect for painters and sculptors, there remained a strong aristocratic prejudice against all manual production or performance for pay no matter how intelligent, skilled or inspired it might be. (p23)

The highest status went to rhetoric (speeches) and poetry, which were not manual work. But the typical Roman poet was either an aristocratic amateur or wrote to celebrate the patron who paid him. This was far removed from our modern conception of the artist.

Our contemplative ‘aesthetic’ detachment did not yet exist. Greek and Roman art was ‘thoroughly embedded in social, political, religious and practical contexts’ (p24) and judged on its unity of moral use and excellence of execution. There was no conception of a distinctly ‘aesthetic’ pleasure, no ‘art for art’s sake’. Even those much-admired Greek statues served social purposes.

Beauty (kalon) was as much about morality and nobility of character as appearance (aesthetics). For all the excellence of their art, the ancients generally did not separate beauty of appearance from morality and function, or try to group certain products on the basis of it. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, there are anticipations of modern notions. Nonetheless, the Christian era perpetuated ancient attitudes and the modern system wouldn’t appear for another 1500 years after Jesus.

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages also made no distinction between fine arts and crafts. Embroidery for example was highly rated. Lists of arts from Augustine (5th century CE) to Aquinas (13th century) mixed painting, sculpture and architecture with the likes of navigation, horsemanship and shoemaking.

Early medieval writers continued the Hellenistic/Roman ‘liberal vs vulgar’ division. Education divided the ‘liberal’ arts thus:

• Trivium: logic, grammar, rhetoric
• Quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music theory

In the 12th century, the Saxon theologian Hugh of St Victor proposed renaming the ‘vulgar’ arts as ‘mechanical’, and having seven of them as opposed to the seven liberal arts. This gave them more dignity in the system of knowledge. Various lists of mechanical arts were circulated – Hugh listed weaving, armament, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine and theatrics. But their status was challenged by the persistent noble disdain for manual labour, e.g. in Aquinas who takes it from Aristotle.

Usually an artista studied the liberal arts, an artifex practiced the mechanical arts. Most medieval artificers worked for patrons who specified purpose, content and materials, and often worked as part of a workshop. They were makers, not creators, and their pride was in their craft skill, not their originality or genius. But their work required ‘intelligent planning, imaginative conception, and sound judgement, as well as manual dexterity’ and they occasionally signed their work and won local renown (p31). We must avoid imposing our own binaries on this era: the medieval artisan/artist was neither a modern-style individualist ‘artist’ nor the anonymous ‘mere’ craftsperson of the Romantics.

Women of course faced discrimination in the Middle Ages. However the arts were not sharply gender divided. The division into private and public spheres that domesticated women came later. Much production – manuscripts, embroidery, poetry, music – came from religious orders, female as well as male. Secular workshops employed both sexes. Women could join guilds and run businesses, and could be respected composers, such as Hildegard of Bingen.

Poets/sculptors/painters/composers were neither modern-style creators nor mere craftspeople following rules. They were artisan/artists of various ranks and statuses.

Like the ancients, medieval people did not conceive of an aesthetic appearance separate from function or fitness for purpose, and discussions of beauty were mostly about God, not artworks, embracing morality and utility. Beauty in mundane things was ‘right proportion in relation to purpose.’

In the Middle Ages there was neither fine art nor craft in the modern sense but only arts... people responded to function, content and form together rather than holding one or the other in suspension. (p34)

Shiner gives an example: Aquinas wrote that if we made a saw out of glass, it would be useless as a saw and thus a failed instance of art, and so couldn’t be beautiful. Today, it would be a work of art.

The Renaissance

Roughly 1350-1600 the transition to the new system of art began. Contrary to revisionist or romantic exaggerations about the Renaissance, it was only a beginning, and the old system still regulated production; the new ideas and attitudes appeared only in a small and atypical elite. Although the status of the artisan/artist grows, someone like Michelangelo remained an artisan/artist, not a ‘tortured genius’.

If the popular image of the ‘Renaissance artist’ distorts the career of Michelangelo, how much less does it fit the majority of painters, sculptors, and architects of the Renaissance? (p47)

It is anachronistic to try and impose our modern concepts on past societies based on glimpses of similar ideas taken out of the context of the actually dominant ideas and practices.

Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait, 1500

Three steps were taken towards the modern system:

• The artist’s (auto)biography. E.g. Cellini. Celebrates individual accomplishments. Also Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) – NB it was not called Lives of the Artists, as the concept ‘artist’ was not yet available. Vasari refers to the artifice or ‘artificer’.
• The artist’s self-portrait. E.g. Dürer’s (right). These represented the claim to greater status by mostly a small elite of ‘court artists’.
• The rise of the court artist: ‘those painters, sculptors, and architects who managed to separate themselves from the majority of their fellow artisan/artists by appointments to reigning princes and to elaborate a justification for their high status’ (p42). Even this atypical minority were still employees, producing to commission.

Despite these steps towards autonomy, the Renaissance norm was cooperative production in workshops, fulfilling proscriptive contracts (many survive) for churches/decoration/furniture etc.

Though there were exceptional women like Gentileschi and Anguissola, women were gradually excluded from higher status arts via exclusion from guilds. The main cause was the beginning of the transformation of the family from a work unit to a domestic household. Increasingly women were domesticated child-rearers. As embroidery became domesticated and practiced by women, it lost its former high status.

The term ‘invention’ was related to science and referred to the discovery, selection and arrangement of content. By the late 16th century, invention was more associated with imagination/inspiration/talent, but was still inseparable from skill/facility and from imitation for a purpose. Works were judged by how well they gracefully overcame difficulties.

Shiner compares the approaches of Shakespeare and Jonson. English writers were either amateur (aristocrats who distributed poetry privately) or professional (making a living by writing). The latter was only possible via playwriting and collaboration, e.g. Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s plays were not fixed texts or ‘works of art’ in our sense, but malleable scripts constantly revised for public performance. (p48)

Shiner contrasts these amateur and professional models with the ‘laureate’ model of Jonson, who sought status and avoided theatre life by finding patrons; he emphasises his own authorship and published his plays as ‘works’. Women were discouraged from writing.

The Renaissance had no concept of the ‘aesthetic’ contemplation of self-contained works. Art was not contemplated for its own sake; it was produced by workshops for particular purposes as part of social, religious and political life.

We are so used to viewing Renaissance paintings on the walls of museums or in book illustrations or slides that it takes some effort to remember that nearly everything now in our museums was originally made on commission and often designed to fit a specific location. (p53)

The Renaissance had only a ‘proto-aesthetic’. Taste was not separated from function, and very few took up the modern, detached aesthetic attitude.

17th century

The 17th century was transitional. Important steps towards the modern system of the arts included:

• Establishment of institutions such as the Académie Francaise (France, 1635), Poet Laureate (England), Royal Academy of Architecture (France, 1670), etc. The guilds are undermined.
• Emergence of the art market (Netherlands). Paintings were done in advance for sale to the public, though the workshop model persists. 
• Status of painters, poets, musicians continues to rise. 

Two Latin terms behind our word ‘genius’:

• Ingegno (talent): innate talent. French esprit, English wit.
• Genius (genius): a guardian spirit/genie. Over the 17th century, this took on the meaning of ingegno, but ‘genius’ still had to be accompanied by reason and judgement. 

The idea of the artisan/artist was in transition towards its modern meaning:

• ‘Imagination’: didn’t have its modern, elevated meaning. It was a storehouse of sensory traces (image retention) or mediation between body and mind. When it turned to fantasy, Hobbes, Descartes, Pascal and Dryden became suspicious of it.
• ‘Invention’: didn’t have its modern sense of originality, subjectivity, creation. They did not create beauty but discovered what was already there.

The category of ‘fine art’ was not yet established; that needed the breakup of the liberal vs mechanical arts polarity, which was still widely used but becoming dated. As the sciences grew in stature and developed a modern methodology, topics like geometry and astronomy seemed to belong more with ‘mechanical’ subjects than with music theory; rhetoric went into decline and was reduced to style.

The arts remained broadly functional. There were no art museums, only their forerunners: aristocratic collections and cabinets of curiosities. The concept of ‘taste’ (social and artistic discrimination) begins to spread; but only a tiny elite began to appreciate art ‘for its own sake’, and debates were dominated by classicism:

The core beliefs of classicism were that painting, poetry, and music are arts of imitation, for which the object is the beautiful in nature, the means is reason, and the end is to instruct through pleasure. (p72-3)

Champions of feeling and individual judgement wanted to enlarge the scope of reason, not challenge it. The new emphasis on feeling would eventually develop into 18th century ‘sentiment’.

There was no sharp break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The real transition from old to modern system of art started in the 17th century. But though everything was in place by about 1690, the reorganisation did not become regulative for another 50 years.

Part II: Art Divided

Shiner recognises three stages in the formation of the modern system of the arts.

1. Around 1680-1750: elements of emerging modern system became integrated.
2. Around 1750-1800: definitive separation of fine art from craft, artist from artisan, aesthetic from other experience.
3. Around 1800-1830: consolidation; art becomes an autonomous spiritual domain; the vocation of artist is sanctified; the aesthetic replaces taste. 

Constructing fine art, the artist, and the artwork

The category of fine art was made possible by the breakup of the traditional scheme of liberal and mechanical arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry had to be separated from the other liberal arts to form a distinct group. This needed three things:

• A set of arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry – formalised in the 1740s and firmly established by the 1750s.
• A term to identify them: the eventual winner was the French beaux-arts (beautiful arts), translated in English as ‘polite arts’ or ‘fine arts’. Its meaning was fixed in the 1740s and 1750s. 
• A principle for distinguishing this set of diverse practices from sciences, crafts, etc: the fine arts are for a special kind of refined pleasure (as opposed to utility), which transformed over the 18th century into the ‘aesthetic’.

The key contribution came in 1746 with Charles Batteux’s The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle. This was the first major book to associate the term beaux-arts with a set list of arts with a guiding principle (namely the imitation of beautiful nature). The book quickly made an impact in France, England and Germany, and captured the movement towards a new conception of the arts.

Then in 1751 the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert grouped the tree of human knowledge into memory, reason and imagination. The latter isolated poetry, painting, sculpture, engraving and music from other disciplines; they were distinguished by pleasure and inventive genius.

The category of fine art spread across Europe and was firmly established by the end of the century. Debates raged over which arts were included, and over the criteria, which mostly involved some combination of imitation, genius, imagination, pleasure and taste.

These conceptual changes were accompanied by new institutions, nearly all of which started in the 18th century: the art museum, the secular concert, literary criticism, public lending libraries, etc. 

• The literary scene: supported by public libraries and a print explosion of books/journals. The separation of imaginative literature from other kinds. Copyright laws gave ownership to the writer rather than the printer, laying the foundations for ideas of genius, originality and creation for writers. This all helped create literary criticism, art history (e.g. Winckelmann) and canons of exemplary great works.
• The art market: appeared mid-century. An increasing number of collectors allowed for specialisation. Encouraged an aura of exclusivity for ‘fine art’ such as easel paintings.
• Art exhibitions and museums: began with annual salons and public exhibitions (sometimes with a fee to keep out the working class); later, aristocratic collections were partly opened to the public. Taking art from its original social context helped create the concept of the autonomy of art.
• The Grand Tour (in Germany and France, the ‘Italian Journey’): An educational trip to Italy for the privileged classes in which art, including architecture, was centre stage. From mid-century it expands into the middle class – the birth of tourism.
• Public concerts: by mid-century public, paid-for concerts were fashionable. Listening to music for itself was followed by music criticism & history.
• The art public: the art audience used to be a small elite of patrons, conoisseurs, amateurs. Now the new institutions created a much larger public, large enough to subsidise art production. The middle class was more diverse, from a range of social layers, with tastes less clear-cut. A class division emerged between educated and popular culture. In Britain the term ‘polite’ described the meeting of bourgeois and aristocratic manners and taste.

By the 1750s there was a separation of the artist from the artisan, which began to be seen as opposites.

• Painting: academies raised the status of some painters (easel) at the expense of more functional ones (decorators, sign-painters). Art market and technology created more specialisation, separating easel painters from functional ones. Paintings were increasingly produced for the market, leading to interest in the individual painter’s personal style/reputation.
• Architecture: the urban boom raised the status and professionalisation of architects, and separated their role from surveyors, engineers etc; some architects could exalt their artistry over practical building craft.
• Literature: writers shifted from patronage to making a living on the market. Competing for scraps could come at the cost of dignity, until copyright law in the 18th century granted ownership to writers and raised their status. 
• Music: musicians were dependent on patronage for longer. Most couldn’t win their independence by selling on the market, like Beethoven, until the end of the century. Openings were created by teaching, secular concerts, and middle-class demand for sheet music.

Outcome: the artist and artisan were pulled apart.

• The ‘poetic’ attributes (imagination, freedom, creativity, genius) were ascribed to the artist.
• Stigmatised ‘mechanical’ attributes (rules, imitation, service/dependency, routine) were ascribed to the mere artisan.

A new identity developed for the artist.

• Originality: stress on making something new rather than imitating past masters. 
• Inspiration/enthusiasm: reverence for the fire of genius, and a turn towards empathy and self-expression. 
• Imagination: this moved from image-storing or dangerous fantasy to creative, productive imagination, which acquired a place in the theory of knowledge (e.g. Kant).
• Creation: the early 18th century still favoured ‘invention’ and construction. Thinkers were cautious, because creation was for God. The old union = facility + invention; the new union = facility subordinated to spontaneous creation.

Craft was demoted and partly feminised. Women were encouraged into amateur accomplishments such as needle arts and drawing. They were thought capable only of lesser genres, and denied genius. Gifted women were not supposed to step out of a conventional role.

A new idea emerged of the ‘work of art’.

• Old system: a work was the constructed product of a techne, connected to a purpose and place, and readily amended by others.
• New system: works were fixed, self-contained creations, not tied to purpose and place, complete in themselves. Internal perfection, not external purpose.
• A masterpiece was formerly a demonstration piece which an artisan/artist presented to the guild to show s/he was now a master. By the 18th century, a ‘masterpiece’ was now ‘a particularly exceptional work in the new sense of a fixed and self-contained world’ (p126) made by an artist-genius.

Patronage was replaced by the market, which was dominant by the early 19th century.

• Old system: patrons commissioned works for a specific context, prescribing materials, content, etc. Alongside judgements of quality, the work was judged on how well it met its purpose. Patrons were in a powerful position vis-à-vis the artist.
• Market system: the artist produces in advance then tries to sell the work, often through a dealer/agent. The criteria of success are internal to the work. Producing for the market gives the impression of artistic freedom, but the artist must produce work that the public will buy.

From taste to the aesthetic

‘Taste’ was transformed into the ‘aesthetic’ (a term coined by Baumgarten mid-century).

• Taste: a physiological/social concept that includes food, dress, manners. Metaphorical connection to bodily senses. Sight and hearing supposedly more ‘elevated’ than other, too-sensual senses.
• Aesthetic: beauty, the meaning of art. Separate from ordinary, sensual pleasures.

Steps towards the aesthetic included coaching the public to behave in a new way.

• The picturesque tour (William Gilpin) encouraged travellers to regard landscape like paintings, attending to visual appeal rather than social content.
• Audiences were often rowdy, inattentive, sat on the stage, etc. Then there was a gradual shift towards theatre as an art illusion whose audiences should sit in respectful silence; this was the norm by the mid-19th century.
• Journals/periodicals tried to train people in contemplative reading.
• Museums posted signs telling people not to sing, joke or play games.
• Art was about refined, spiritual pleasure, not instruction. It started to be associated with the ‘cult of art’ and ‘inflated, quasi-religious rhetoric’.

Wider public access to art raised the ‘problem of taste’: did everyone feel the same way? Is taste universal? If so, why do we have divergent opinions? Many 18th century writers assumed the exclusion to various degrees of: the working class, black people, women, the vulgar rich, and conspicuous consumers. This left a small group of educated, leisured upper-class people of taste. Was their taste innate? What social/mental characteristics were required?

A distinct category of fine arts had been constructed and had been conceptually and institutionally separated from contexts of use and everyday pleasure, inviting a similar separation of the experience of fine art from other kinds of experience. Over the course of the eighteenth century, innumerable artists, critics, and philosophers tried their hand at answering these questions in a flood of books, essays, and letters and, in the process, constructed the modern idea of the aesthetic. (p140)

Three major elements of the older idea of taste were transformed:

1. (Most important) Ordinary pleasure in beauty → a special kind of refined and intellectualised pleasure.
2. Idea of unprejudiced judgement → an ideal of disinterested contemplation.
3. Preoccupation with beauty → the sublime and the idea of the self-contained work of art as creation.

The polite classes withdraw from popular culture and stigmatise it.

Early in the 18th century, writers such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Dubos ascribed the pleasure of taste to an ‘inner eye’ or ‘internal sense’. This was in tension with the need to develop taste through experience (quality of mind vs social attainment). Thinkers like Hume and Rousseau tried to distinguish sentiment from ordinary sensuality, feeling from emotion. They ‘joined sentiment and reason in a kind of spontaneous or tacit knowledge, suggesting a third kind of experience combining elements of both’ (p142). Calm reflection was preferred to wild feeling. Audiences should be moved, yet calm, combining intellectual concentration with intense feeling – an ‘aesthetic’ attitude.

Modern aesthetic experience needed two further refinements.

• The old system of the arts tied taste to having a ‘stake’ (moral/practical/recreational) in the work’s purpose. The new system preferred the idea of disinterested contemplation: an intense attention with no desire for possession or gratification. This had two sources:
• Aristocratic/political: Only those with wealth and leisure can rise above self-interest and see society as a whole.
• Philosophic/religious: Rational contemplation of the true, good and beautiful. Also a throwback to the Middle Ages’ contemplative love of God: the beautiful object makes us forget ourselves in a pure pleasure.
• Analysing the objective qualities of the beautiful led to the separation of beauty from the sublime and the picturesque. 
• The sublime began as a rhetorical grandeur of effect. In the 18th century it came to mean an ‘overpowering greatness’ experienced from safety, and was contrasted with beauty which was more pleasant. 
• Gendering: beauty was feminine; the sublime (more powerful and important) was masculine.

Shiner closes Part II with a useful comment on Baumgarten, who ‘wanted a word for sensation’s own logic.’

By providing a separate term for the joint working of sense and imagination in the arts, Baumgarten did three things: he gave feeling or sentiment a more important role in the panoply of the mental powers; he provided a technical term whose range of meaning could be more easily stipulated than the word ‘taste’, with its inevitable physiological and social associations; and he opened the way for the term ‘aesthetic’ to become the name for a special mode of knowing. Since it was a new coinage, it could easily be given several significations, and there has been an equivocation from the beginning between the broad use of ‘aesthetic’ for any sort of value system having to do with art or beauty and ‘the aesthetic’ as a special form of disinterested knowledge, uniting feeling and reason. (p146)

All these developments together gave us the modern system of the arts. This system took many decades to become accepted, and was not completed until the early decades of the 19th century, but is often taken for granted today. Here is my handy table:

Old system of the arts	Modern system of the arts
Over 2000 years: Antiquity and Middle Ages	500 years: Renaissance until the present
Artisan-artists	Artists separate from craftspeople
An ‘art’ or techne was any craft or discipline with rules	Art = autonomous works created for aesthetic contemplation
Patronage, commission	Market, commodification
Division into liberal arts vs vulgar/mechanical arts	Division into fine arts vs crafts
Ordinary pleasure in the useful or entertaining	Refined, contemplative, spiritual pleasure (aesthetic)
Collaboration: guilds, workshops	Individuals
Social function	Autonomy; art for art’s sake
Specific place or purpose	Self-contained works
Worked judged on its unity of morality and excellence of execution	Detached aesthetic judgement
Beauty = morality, character, appearance, function	Beauty as subjective aesthetic pleasure
Invention (discovery, selection, arrangement)	Inspiration, genius
Borrowing, amending the work of others	Copyright, intellectual property
Makers	Creators

Part III: Countercurrents

Shiner starts Part III with a neat summary:

During the century between Perrault’s speech setting off the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns and Schiller’s celebration of aesthetic fine art as humanity’s salvation from inner division [1680s-1790s], an enormous change in the ideals and institutions of art had taken place across Europe. From a seventeenth-century world in which the arts were purposefully integrated into society and there were few separate arts institutions, the expansion of the middle class and a market system for the arts led to the emergence of nearly all the modern institutions and practices of fine art: in painting, there were now art exhibitions, art auctions, art dealers, art criticism, art history, and a new emphasis on the signature; in music, there were now secular concerts, the elimination of stage seating in the opera, the development of music criticism and music history, the emergence of the ‘work’ concept and its practices of exact notation, complete scores, and opus numbers, along with an end to borrowing and recycling; in literature there were circulating libraries, literary criticism, and history, the development of vernacular canons, the establishment of copyright, and a new status for the author as free creator.

Accompanying these institutional and behavioural changes was a parallel revolution in the concepts and terms for the arts. The older and broader notion of art (‘an art’) was divided into the category of fine art versus craft, the older idea of the artisan/artist was divided into the ideal of the artist as creator versus the artisan as routine maker, and the older idea of taste was divided into the refined and intellectualised experience called ‘aesthetic’ in contrast to the ordinary pleasures of sense and function. And within each of the three new categories of art, artist and aesthetic, there were new component ideas or new meanings for older ones. In the case of the artist, for example, there were heightened ideals of freedom and genius, as well as profound shifts from imitation to originality, invention to creation, the reproductive to the creative imagination. Taken together all these changes in institutions, practices, ideals, and terms constituted the modern system of fine arts that is still largely in place today. (p154)

It took time for this to take place, and the shift from old to new was uneven, with dissent along the way. In Part III Shiner looks at Hogarth, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft as alternatives to the emerging idea of autonomous aesthetic. Torn between old and new, each resisted the concept of refined and contemplative taste in favour of sensual pleasure and social utility, forming an alternative tradition.

• Hogarth: Beauty is ordinary, sensuous pleasure, available to the ordinary eye with no need for superior education or status. Uneasy with the elitism of the ‘aesthetic’, he wanted to democratise taste.
• Rousseau: The arts had been corrupted by society, and were now luxury and display used to mark social differences. He attacked the art/craft distinction and saw taste as an ordinary, sensual kind of pleasure. There should be open, happy public festivals, not silent, exclusive contemplation.
• Wollstonecraft: Critical of the separation of art from life. Rejected Burke’s appeal to refined taste in both aesthetics and (reactionary) politics, and his view of women. She breaks with the contemplative ideal by making a progressive link with political morality – e.g. the ‘picturesque’ excludes the poor labourers who live in those settings. Taste should be a union of everyday sensual pleasure with social justice.

The triumph of the modern system of the arts came in the early decades of the 19th century as its ideas ‘took deeper root through idealism and romanticism and through the expansion of the new institutions and art public’ (p168).

Shiner devotes a chapter to discussing the French Revolution and its struggle between the old and new systems of art. The Revolution tried and failed to resist autonomy and privatisation of the arts. Sharing the old system of the arts’ respect for utility and service, the revolutionaries wanted to integrate the arts into society through festivals, political songs, etc. But they were at the same time encouraging a market economy hostile to such a project. There were debates over what to do with signs of royal power: do you topple statues of kings, or preserve them as works of art? The discourses of destruction vs conservation found a solution in the transformation of the Louvre into a national art museum: putting ‘monuments of royalty’ into a museum would hopefully destroy their power and they would become merely art.

In response to the looting of art treasures by Bonaparte, Quatremère de Quincy argued against the art museum. Removing works from their historical context destroys their meaning; in museums they become sacred relics of Art, or undervalued like merchandise. Art speaks to us when made for a specific purpose and place; creating artworks for the market makes us see them as goods, or value them only on formal/technical merit. Despite such criticism, the Louvre became a temple of fine art and the model for the modern art museum. Artists started to think their works belonged in museums, a spur towards ‘art for art’s sake’. The French Revolution failed to reintegrate the fine arts with social and political life.

---

I will stop my synopsis there, as this post is already long enough. In Part IV Shiner explains how art was elevated to Art in the 19th century, and in Part V he discussed some ways in which the modern system of the arts has been both expanded and undermined by various challenges. Go and find the book: it is essential reading.

Footnotes

Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (University of Chicago Press, 2001)

Kristeller’s Modern System of the Arts

Paul Oskar Kristeller was a Jewish-German scholar of Renaissance humanism who fled from Europe to the USA in 1939. In an obituary, John Monfasani wrote, ‘He may prove to have been, after Jakob Burckhardt, the most important student of the Renaissance in modern times.’¹

One of Kristeller’s key contributions to aesthetics is his famous essay ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’. This appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas in two parts, the first in October 1951, the second in January 1952. (These links take you to protected content on JSTOR but you can open a free account that will let you read them. Otherwise you can find the essay online if you look for it.)

This was a classic study in the history and philosophy of art that went on to influence philosophers like Larry Shiner – it is essential reading for anyone interested in aesthetics. These are simply my notes on the essay with hardly any comment. The page references are to the page numbers in the journals.

Notes

Kristeller remind us that several terms and concepts were coined, or acquired their modern senses, in the 18th century:

• the term ‘aesthetics’ 
• philosophy of art
• the beaux-arts 
• key concepts such as taste, sentiment, genius, originality, creative imagination

Kristeller writes:

We must be careful about applying these concepts to earlier eras. Some scholars have rightly noticed that only the eighteenth century produced a type of literature in which the various arts were compared with each other and discussed on the basis of common principles, whereas up to that period treatises on poetics and rhetoric, on painting and architecture, and on music had represented quite distinct branches of writing and were primarily concerned with technical precepts rather than with general ideas. (497)

For us moderns, the five key ‘fine arts’ are painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry. Kristeller calls these the ‘irreducible nucleus of the modern system of the arts’. Others such as dance or prose literature are sometimes included on the list. Most writers since Kant have taken it for granted that these arts exist as a distinct area separated from the crafts and sciences. Kristeller comments:

This system of the five major arts, which underlies all modern aesthetics and is so familiar to us all, is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth century, although it has many ingredients which go back to classical, medieval and Renaissance thought. (498)

The ancients

The Greeks and Romans had no conception of the fine arts. The words we translate as ‘art’ – techne (Greek) and ars (Latin) – indicated a variety of crafts and sciences. They were human as opposed to natural, and could be taught and learned.

When the Greek authors began to oppose Art to Nature, they thought of human activity in general. (499)

E.g. Aristotle thinks of a techne as an activity based upon knowledge.

Beauty, too, did not have its modern connotations. The Greek and Roman terms kalon and pulchrum went hand-in-hand with a sense of moral good, and could be used without reference to art. Later thinkers (Plotinus, Augustine) start to include something like an ‘aesthetic’ meaning, but without leading to a separate system of aesthetics.

The most respected art form in ancient times was poetry. Kristeller points out that rather than being included in a set of ‘fine arts’, poetry was instead classified alongside logic and rhetoric (eloquence), thanks to the ordering of the works of Aristotle. This organisation was influential until the Renaissance.

Music was also esteemed but was often grouped with dance and poetry because of the Greek tradition of performing poetry with musical accompaniment. The Pythagoreans’ work on musical intervals ensured that music theory was grouped with mathematics rather than with other ‘fine arts’.

Painting, sculpture and architecture had lower prestige than one would expect. The first two were disdained as manual work. No ancient philosopher wrote a treatise on the visual arts².

Among the ancients, the link between the fine arts was imitation (mimesis). But architecture was excluded, and other activities were seen as also seen as imitative.

Later antiquity did develop a system of ‘liberal arts’: attempts to organise education into a system of elementary disciplines. Various groupings were posed. The list of Martianus Capella was: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Note how this does not resemble the modern system of fine arts, and instead mixes what we consider arts and sciences. Similar issues arise with the distribution of arts between the nine Muses. This practice was late, and not uniform, mixing arts and sciences – various branches of poetry and of music, with eloquence, history, dance, grammar, geometry and astronomy – and with no Muse for either painting or sculpture. Thus the five fine arts of the modern system were not grouped together but routinely split up and grouped elsewhere:

• Poetry with grammar and rhetoric
• Music with mathematics and astronomy
• Visual arts (excluded from Muses and ‘liberal arts’) are manual crafts.

Regarding antiquity, Kristeller concludes:

Thus classical antiquity left no systems or elaborate concepts of an aesthetic nature, but merely a number of scattered notions and suggestions that exercised a lasting influence down to modern times but had to be carefully selected, taken out of their context, rearranged, reemphasized and reinterpreted or misinterpreted before they could be utilized as building materials for aesthetic systems. We have to admit the conclusion, distasteful to many historians of aesthetics but grudgingly admitted by most of them, that ancient writers and thinkers, though confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art from their intellectual, moral, religious and practical function or content, or to use such an aesthetic quality as a standard for grouping the fine arts together or for making them the subject of a comprehensive philosophical interpretation. (506)

The Middle Ages

The early Middle Ages inherited the ancient educational scheme of seven liberal arts. The growth of learning in the 12th and 13th centuries forced some rethinking of the scheme and the formulation of seven mechanical arts to correspond to the liberal ones. The lists varied. Kristeller offers (in Latin): weaving, armaments, navigation, agriculture, hunting, medicine, theatre, with various subclassifications. Again, our ‘fine arts’ are not grouped but are scattered throughout such schemes. Poetry and music were taught in universities, whereas the visual arts were taught in artisans’ guilds, associated with druggists, goldsmiths, masons and carpenters. Treatises on individual ‘fine arts’ were technical in character and linked them neither with the other arts nor with philosophy.

The concept of ‘art’ retained its broad, classical meaning.

For Aquinas shoemaking, cooking and juggling, grammar and arithmetic are no less and in no other sense artes than painting and sculpture, poetry and music. (509)

When thinkers like Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite and Aquinas theorised beauty, it was not linked to art, but dealt with the metaphysics of God and creation.

Renaissance

Kristeller observes:

The period of the Renaissance brought about many important changes in the social and cultural position of the various arts and thus prepared the ground for the later development of aesthetic theory. But, contrary to a widespread opinion, the Renaissance did not formulate a system of the fine arts or a comprehensive theory of aesthetics. (510)

Renaissance humanism reorganised the liberal arts, raising the prestige of poetry and prose, first in Latin then in vernacular (i.e. the modern everyday languages). The revival of Platonism spread the idea of the divine madness of the poet, which sowed the seed of modern ideas of genius. In the 16th century Aristotle’s Poetics was translated and discussed. Music and poetry came closer together, not least through the creation of opera. The visual arts saw a steady rise in prestige and were linked with science and literature: there were calls for painting to be raised to a liberal art so it might approach the prestige of music, rhetoric and literature (poetry).

In consequence, in 16th century Italy (later elsewhere) the three visual arts – painting, sculpture, architecture – were separated from crafts for the first time, moving from the guilds to their own Academy of Art (Florence, 1563). A parallel was made for the first time between painting and poetry, on the basis of Horace’s ut pictura poesis. Educated circles began debating the relative merits of different activities and this provided an arena for promoting the arts.

Music, painting and poetry began to be grouped together as subjects of appreciation for the gentleman:

by the first half of the seventeenth century, the taste and pleasure produced by painting, music and poetry is felt by several authors to be of a similar nature. (517)

However Renaissance theories of beauty still followed ancient models and did not reference art. The classifications of arts and sciences still scattered the ‘fine arts’ in various places and did not separate them from the sciences.

These changes prepared the ground for the modern system of fine arts but did not yet constitute such a system.

17th century

In the 17th century, cultural leadership in Europe passed from Italy to France. France enjoyed fine achievements in the arts such as Poussin’s paintings and Lully’s music.

This was accompanied by the founding of the Académie Francaise in 1635, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1648, and other bodies. This shouldn’t be mistaken for a system of the arts. But alongside them came a theoretical and critical literature on the arts. They evince a desire to achieve a status for painting equal to poetry, and this honour was occasionally also extended to sculpture and architecture.

Kristeller notes the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns: in this age of scientific advances, the moderns felt they had outstripped the ancients in the accumulation of knowledge, but the merits ‘in certain other fields, which depend on individual talent and on the taste of the critic,’ were more controversial. This helped prepare the ground for a division of the arts and sciences.

The separation between the arts and the sciences in the modern sense presupposes not only the actual progress of the sciences in the seventeenth century but also the reflection upon the reasons why some  other human intellectual activities which we now call the Fine Arts did not or could not participate in the same kind of progress. (526)

Kristeller also points to the role of Charles Perrault, whose book Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes separated the arts from the sciences.

Perrault states explicitly that at least in the case of poetry and eloquence, where everything depends on talent and taste, progress cannot be asserted with the same confidence as in the case of the sciences which depend on measurement. (526-7).

Perrault proposed a category of Beaux-Arts as opposed to the liberal arts, though he included optics and mechanics alongside eloquence, poetry, music, architecture, painting and sculpture.

The fluctuations of the scheme show how slowly emerged the notion which to us seems so thoroughly obvious. (527)

On the brink of the 18th century, modern Western culture was close to the modern system of the arts, but had not quite reached it.

The 18th century

During the first half of the 18th century the modern system of the arts became fixed through a series of critical writings and treatises that probably reflected cultured discussions in Paris and London.

In 1719 the Abbé Dubos, though he did not invent the term beaux-arts, popularised the idea that poetry is one of them. He conceived of arts dependent on genius or talent as opposed to sciences dependent on knowledge, though he still lacked a system. Other initial steps were taken by Crousaz, Voltaire, Père André.

The decisive step for Kristeller was made by the Abbé Batteux in Les beaux arts réduits d’un même principe (1746): the first writer to lay out a clear-cut system of the fine arts in a dedicated treatise. He had an enormous influence, especially in Germany. HIs fine arts were music, poetry, painting, sculpture and dance. Theses were separated from the mechanical arts and had pleasure as their end. Another grouping – eloquence and architecture – combined pleasure with utility. The principle the fine arts had in common is imitation of nature, which, Kristeller says, allowed Batteux to claim classical authority for his scheme:

The ‘imitative’ arts were the only authentic ancient precedent for the ‘fine arts,’ and the principle of imitation could be replaced only after the system of the latter had been so firmly established as no longer to need the ancient principle of imitation to link them together. (21)

Batteux faced various criticisms (e.g. Diderot) but his system remained intact. In his Discours préliminaire (1751), written for the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert criticised the liberal vs mechanical arts distinction and divided the liberal arts into 1) the fine arts, with pleasure as their end, and 2) more useful arts such as grammar, logic and morals. His main division of knowledge was into history, philosophy and the fine arts. A new concept of the ‘fine arts’ was taking over from the old divisions of human activities, and by adding architecture to the five basic fine arts the Encyclopédie codified the new system beyond Batteux. This view was gradually popularised and stabilised, and began to be influenced by the development of aesthetics in Germany.

In the early 19th century the philosopher Victor Cousin created a philosophical system around the Good, the True and the Beautiful, the latter meaning art and aesthetics. This helped to establish aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. Romanticism also affected the conception of the arts and led to theories that resembled those of the present-day even more closely.

In the 18th century, Britain too made important contributions to artistic thought. William Wotton wrote a treatise (1705) on the Quarrel that followed Perrault in emphasising, says Kristeller, the ‘fundamental difference between the sciences that had made progress since antiquity, and the arts that had not’.

The philosopher Shaftesbury was interested in the arts, and Kristeller notes:

Since Shaftesbury was the first major philosopher in modern Europe in whose writings the discussion of the arts occupied a prominent place, there is some reason for considering him as the founder of modern aesthetics. (27)

However, the Platonist Shaftesbury did not distinguish between moral and aesthetic beauty, and his conceptions of poetry do not go beyond those of older authors.

Also influential was Joseph Addison, whose essays on the imagination appeared in the Spectator in 1712. He referred to gardening and architecture, painting and sculpture, poetry and music as products and pleasures of the imagination.

Francis Hutcheson went further than Shaftesbury in distinguishing between the moral sense and the sense of beauty, preparing the way for the separation of aesthetics from ethics.

Various further writers popularised the idea that poetry, painting and music should be grouped together. By the second half of the century, the notion of a distinct group of fine arts was taken for granted. At the turn of the century Coleridge imports aesthetic ideas from Kant and other German idealist thinkers.

Germany

German thinkers didn’t really enter the debate until the 18th century, though French and English writers had some influence on them.

Baumgarten coined the terms ‘aesthetics’, by which he meant a theory of sensuous knowledge, and thereby helped to found aesthetics:

Baumgarten is the founder of aesthetics in so far as he first conceived a general theory of the arts as a separate philosophical discipline with a distinctive and well-defined place in the system of philosophy. (35)

However he did not offer us a system of fine arts.

In the second half of the century, other German thinkers incorporated the French conception into philosophical aesthetics, and interest in the arts expanded. Kristeller comments that the role of Lessing’s Laokoon (1766) has been misjudged. Lessing sought on the one hand to break the long-held parallel between poetry and painting, while paying no attention to the much bigger historical movement to group those and other arts into a new system of the arts.

Kristeller says the biggest contributions between Baumgarten and Kant came from Moses Mendelssohn, Sulzer and Herder. Mendelssohn called for aesthetic principles to be formulated for the fine arts as a whole, and ‘thus was the first among the Germans to formulate a system of the fine arts...’

He did not work out an explicit theory of aesthetics, but under the impact of French and English authors he indicated the direction in which German aesthetics was to develop from Baumgarten to Kant. (38)

The Swiss Johann Georg Sulzer developed aesthetics more systematically in his General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771–74). This was ‘the first attempt to carry out on a large scale the program formulated by Baumgarten and Mendelssohn,’ and popularised the idea that the fine arts were a group with characteristics in common.

The young Goethe’s criticism of Sulzer for grouping such divergent arts together shows how new the modern system of the arts still was. Herder played a more active role. In Kritische Waelder (1769) he stresses the need to compare the fine arts.

Kristeller ends his historical survey with Kant:

He was the first major philosopher who included aesthetics and the philosophical theory of the arts as an integral part of his system. (42)

The larger of the two divisions of Kant’s major work, the Critique of Judgement, addressed aesthetics. In Kant’s system, aesthetics earned a place alongside epistemology and ethics as a major branch of philosophy. This was an important step, as it won aesthetics a new autonomy. Kant also offered a division of the fine arts: speaking arts, plastic arts, and arts of the beautiful play of sentiments.

Kristeller concludes:

Since Kant aesthetics has occupied a permanent place among the major philosophical disciplines, and the core of the system of the fine arts fixed in the eighteenth century has been generally accepted as a matter of course by most later writers on the subject, except for variations of detail or of explanation. (43)

Conclusion

In conclusion, Kristeller notes that the modern system of arts did not exist in antiquity, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, although elements of it can be seen throughout history.

The ancients:

• The comparison of painting and poetry
• Theory of imitation that linked various art forms

Renaissance:

• Raised the prestige of the visual arts above the crafts
• Invited comparison of different art forms
• Established amateur theorising from viewpoint of critic or viewer, not the artist

17th century:

• Scientific progress helps separate arts and sciences

18th century:

• Treatises by amateurs that group and compare fine arts systematically
• Theory of fine arts accepted as a discipline of philosophy

Kristeller offers little explanation of why the system matured in the 18th century specifically³, noting only some of the institutional developments:

The rise of painting and of music since the Renaissance, not so much in their actual achievements as in their prestige and appeal, the rise of literary and art criticism, and above all the rise of an amateur public to which art collections and exhibitions, concerts as well as opera and theatre performances  were addressed, must be considered as important factors. (44)

He argues aesthetics was primarily formulated by secondary writers outside of systematic philosophy, and only gradually found expression among more important thinkers. Only after Kant do major thinkers take the lead in aesthetics.

Ancient as the art forms are, our modern system of categorising them together as ‘the arts’ is comparatively recent. He reminds us that art forms come and go, and change their relationships, all the time. E.g. arts like stained glass and fresco fall away, while the novel and cinema come to the fore.

The branches of the arts all have their rise and decline, and even their birth and death, and the distinction between ‘major’ arts and their subdivisions is arbitrary and subject to change. There is hardly any ground but critical tradition or philosophical preference for deciding whether engraving is a separate art (as most of the eighteenth-century authors believed) or a subdivision of painting, or whether poetry and prose, dramatic and epic poetry, instrumental and vocal music are separate arts or subdivisions of one major art. (46)

Because of this instability, the modern system of the arts is itself breaking down as artists and critics question its assumptions. All our ideas about the arts are fluid. Kristeller finishes with this thought:

These contemporary changes may help to open our eyes to an understanding of the historical origins and limitations of the modern system of the fine arts. Conversely, such historical understanding might help to free us from certain conventional preconceptions and to clarify our ideas on the present status and future prospects of the arts and of aesthetics. (46)

Notes

1. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-professor-paul-oskar-kristeller-1108254.html
2. Kristeller isn’t quite right about this. We know Polykleitos wrote on proportions in sculpture, Parrhasius on painting, and Agatharcus about scene painting. However none of these works survive.
3. To supply what Kristeller does not: the main impetus was the emergence of capitalism as a mode of production, with its dramatic recasting of the artist as an original creator selling self-contained commodified ‘works’ on the free market to an art-buying public.
 

David Hume: Of the Standard of Taste (Conclusion)

In Of the Standard of Taste, Hume tries to find a standard by which we may settle aesthetic disputes. In setting out a genuine problem in aesthetics with such sophistication, he made a significant contribution to aesthetics. But these are five major problems in his account:

1. His conception of experience is mechanistic
2. He assumes there is a universal taste 
3. He makes no distinction between liking and assessing
4. His reliance on a few select critics is elitist
5. He says very little about what the Standard of Taste is

Claiming there is a sense of taste universal to all humans in all ages, Hume shows little awareness or understanding of how taste is mediated by society, class, history, gender and other forces.

Flowing from this assumption of universality, Hume assumes that his club of ideal critics will agree, or be able to change the mind of someone with a different view to the critics. This is consistent with a belief in the existence of a reliable standard, but is clearly naive. In the real world, there is no ‘joint verdict’ of critics – instead, even among the experts, there is a multitude of voices, sometimes in agreement, sometimes fiercely opposed.

It does not help that Hume makes no allowance for different art forms. All ideal critics will not be able to judge all the arts equally well. An expert in literature will not have the same authority to comment on music, and vice versa.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Scorsese’s The Godfather are both widely regarded as classics of film-making, but they are vastly different films. If there is a universal standard, it cannot lie in the culturally specific forms taken by particular masterpieces – e.g. a film must use montage, or depict Italian-American gangsters, in order to be good – but foundational organising principles from which arise all the diverse forms of film-making, and perhaps of art in general. If there is a universal aesthetic standard, we won’t find it by relying on a select group of critics who equate that standard with their own taste or the perceived taste of their culture as a whole. We are more likely to find it, if anywhere, in anthropology.

The anti-elitist could respond to the idea of art specialists with an indignant, ‘I don’t need to be told what to think – I’ll make up my own mind, thanks very much!’ Such outbreaks of righteous individualism are to be expected. But there does seem to be some common thread in humanity that enables us to admire art from different cultures and eras. How else would people in the modern world find beauty in prehistoric cave paintings, or ancient Mayan stelae, or ancient Greek or Egyptian poems? We do not want to reify one narrow opinion into a universal one, but we do not want to reduce aesthetic experience to individual preferences, either. Most people agree that standards exist. Are they right? Can we reconcile a universal human taste with the fact that culture and taste are socially and historically mediated? I won’t go into my own views for the moment. The best way to find out is through dedicated study by specialists: art historians, critics, aestheticians and other philosophers, and anyone else who can cast light on the question.

We do assume that objective standards exist. This standard may not have anything to do with specific ‘rules of composition’ and may lie instead of fundamental laws like pattern recognition. But any effective solution to problems of aesthetic value must reconcile any universal human taste with the social and historical mediation of taste.

Whatever positions we take, Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste made a hugely important and lasting contribution to aesthetics. Even in the first decades of modern aesthetics, he took one of the most difficult questions facing the discipline and laid out an intelligent analysis that is still provoking discussion two and a half centuries later.
 

David Hume: Of the Standard of Taste (5)

In this post I will consider the issue of... 

Elitism

Hume identifies the Standard of Taste with the joint verdict of ‘true judges’ aka ideal critics. These critics are few in number:

Under some or other of these imperfections, the generality of men labour; and hence a true judge in the finer arts is observed, even during the most polished ages, to be so rare a character (§23).

In my view there is no good reason to doubt that Hume had in mind real people, rather than some kind of ideal to aspire to (though some commentators think otherwise). Does this dependence on a small number of arbiters leave us at the mercy of elitism?

In principle there is nothing wrong with specialists. Society would grind to a halt without them. We have specialist car mechanics, historians, pedagogues, biologists etc whom we rely upon for their expert knowledge. Specialists drive forward our accumulated understanding in their field – we have been employing them since at least the Neolithic Revolution to help us better understand how things work. Why should the arts be any different? Art specialists (by which I do not mean artists, though the two may easily overlap) abound in our schools, publications, media and universities.

Subjectivity

The first issue is the thorny matter of subjective preferences. No one likes to be told they are wrong about liking what they like. They are clearly not wrong, because they like it! On Hume’s view, the rules of composition appeal to the ‘finer emotions of the mind’. Even if we accept that not everyone has the time, temperament, opportunity or training to offer the fullest critical responses to works of art, no one likes to be told they lack the ‘finer emotions of the mind’ (whatever those are). Such objections are where the mutterings against ‘experts’ begin, and help explain why arbiters of taste may be disparaged as an ‘elite’ for offending us with judgements that don’t match with what pleases us.

The difficulty is that what we like does not always accord with what is excellent. We are back to Noël Carroll’s distinction (first discussed here) between liking and assessing. Does the ideal critic have the right to tell a fan of Barbara Cartland that they are wrong to take pleasure in her work and must stop reading her? I for one would not want to say so. Carroll explains:

Hume’s critics do things like compare artworks with other artworks of the same form and genre to assess how good a candidate it is of its kind. They transcend the prejudices of their own time and place in order to approximate the frame of mind of the audience for which a given artwork was made. They exercise good sense in order to determine how well the parts of the artwork function to realise the purpose of the whole.¹

These assessments do not require the critic to love the artwork in question. They are cool, calm assessments made with reference to rules. Often our enjoyment of art does predicate upon how good it is, but there is no necessary connection. Some things we can enjoy as ‘guilty pleasures’, for various reasons, even while we acknowledge their poor quality.

This distinction has implications for the behaviour of the critical ‘elite’. What if a fan claims that Cartland is a better writer than Tolstoy? This is where the critics may perform a useful social function by opening a discussion on precisely why they think Tolstoy is the superior writer and justifying their criteria. But if they condemn us simply for enjoying Cartland more than Tolstoy, they will be guilty of snobbery.

The scandal of taste

Elitism is normally understood negatively, in the non-egalitarian sense of a minority that enjoys disproportionate wealth and/or power and excludes people it considers unworthy. On the surface, Hume’s theory is egalitarian. It asserts a universal, uniform human nature, common to all; if it weren’t for certain impediments that might be experienced by anybody, we would all share the same taste. It is difficult to reconcile this with notorious remarks of his from other works, such as ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites’ and ‘nature has given man the superiority above woman, by endowing him with greater strength both of mind and body’,² which suggest this uniformity does not extend to black people or women. To keep to Of the Standard of Taste, however, Hume lists no prejudiced demands, e.g. that ideal critics must be male, or white, or ruling class. He does routinely refer to ‘men’ rather than, say, ‘people’: this is probably just the gendered language of the day. Hume probably takes for granted that his critics will in fact be men, but from the text’s point of view his critics earn their position purely through their endowments of good sense, delicacy, practice and so on. On the face of it, Hume’s ideal critics are not inherently an ‘elite’ in a negative sense: they are simply experts in their field. Whether or not Hume shared certain prejudices, his system does not depend upon them, so we may simply cast them off.

For Hume, however, universal taste does not mean everybody can be a ideal critic. To resolve disputes over taste we need people who, as far as possible, lack or remove the impediments to correct judgement. Some of a good critic’s faculties – like practice – can be cultivated, but others cannot. Freedom from impediments in the organism is an accident of biology – e.g. a person born deaf cannot experience, let alone judge, music – and we do not normally think of a quality like ‘good sense’ as something that be learnt. In short, we don’t all have what it takes. Therefore to find our Standard of Taste we must look, without prejudice, to a particularly well-equipped group of specialists.

So far, perhaps, so good, but things get more complicated when we look below the surface. Hume appeals to the existence of a uniform human nature, and the existence of a Standard of Taste that is true for all people in all ages. In reality, taste does not and can not exist independently of society, class and history. The very idea of taste and aesthetics, in their modern senses, was conceived – as Larry Shiner has shown³ – during the ‘long eighteenth century’ of 1680-1830. If we don’t take this into account, then our theory loses touch with the dynamics of real life.

The US philosopher Richard Shusterman has argued that beneath the veneer of universality lurk some unspoken assumptions that he called the ‘scandal of taste’:

If taste is not in any significant sense socially and historically conditioned, then a culture’s entrenched aesthetic judgements, the verdicts of taste which have so far dominated it, are thus accorded the status of natural and necessary facts rather than seen as the contingent and alterable product of social dynamics and history. Taste that departs from such a standard is thus not merely different but diseased or unnatural. Historically privileged subjective preferences (essentially those of the historically socially privileged) are reified into an ahistorical, ontological standard, a necessary standard for all subjects and all times.⁴

Hume’s Standard of Taste will be defined by people from a privileged social class, who expect their own taste to be accepted as universal. In fact, the taste of a ideal critic is neither universal nor impartial but socially and historically mediated and, consciously or not, reflects a class interest – as does Hume himself. Shusterman goes on:

[Aesthetic properties] are instead a product of a social praxis, a way of living with art which informs or prestructures our aesthetic response. Thus, in effect, Hume’s good critic turns out to be not one without prejudices but simply one with the right prejudices.

There is an inconsistency in Hume’s position. He claims aesthetic sentiment is natural and universal. Yet he designs his argument to ensure that adjudicating taste requires people who are, Shusterman points out, ‘thoroughly educated, socially trained, and culturally conditioned’. Hume imagines these judges as an elect few, distinct from the masses: for example, in §31 he says a ‘man of learning and reflection’ can make allowances for different customs but that a ‘common audience’ cannot do so. He thinks it a matter of fact that his critics are acknowledged by ‘universal sentiment’ to possess superior faculties (§27), and it is no accident that their virtues of talent, education and industry are precisely the virtues beloved by the liberal bourgeoisie to which Hume belonged. Shusterman spots the underlying intent:

No longer will taste in art be determined by the individual tyranny of patron king, nobleman or bishop, but by the collective tyranny of the educated burghers.

Shusterman argues that Hume was looking for a ‘normative stability’, a liberal bourgeois consensus that could balance personal freedom with conformity. He notes the obvious parallel between the common people 1) submitting their aesthetic disputes to a select body of arbiters and 2) consenting to a bourgeois parliament with, in Hume’s day, a tiny franchise. Hume allows some room for dissent, based upon variation in personalities and customs, but only within the select group.

Most of us agree that there can be glaring differences in quality between artworks, so it is legitimate to ask what the standards are, and finding an answer to that question requires specialists. The question then is, under what conditions are the specialists created, identified and appointed? Of the Standard of Taste does not demand that ideal critics must be white, male and ruling class. But in the reality of Hume’s Britain, they would, in practice, have been white, male and ruling class, because only that section of the population would have enjoyed the education, opportunity, time and resources to acquire the necessary skills. The situation today is better, but only comparatively. However sincerely the critics try to be unprejudiced, their verdicts will be the product of a privileged minority. This is the problem of elitism that confronts Hume’s account: it assumes that a tiny number of bourgeois men may speak for everybody else in the world. Treating their verdicts as authoritative entrenches the ideology and privilege of their class – and, as Shusterman rightly observes, the working class lack the education and resources to challenge those verdicts.

Not canon – Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as a Lute Player,
1615–17

Similarly, one of the main ways of identifying an ideal critic is that s/he liked works that, it turns out, have endured. But who decides which works endure? Quality is not the sole criterion of long-term esteem. Hume is taking a naive view of canon formation, which traditionally vets works on other criteria such as ideology and the sex of the artist. The woman artist Artemisia Gentileschi, for example, is no less deserving of attention than other Baroque painters of her day, but until recently has largely been ignored by art history: should the critic who recognised the quality of her work be refused the status of ‘true judge’ because his or her judgement did not align with the canon of the time?

There may well be a universal aspect to human aesthetic sentiment, but Hume’s method is not best placed to find it. His explicit readiness to allow modern critics to judge the works of other ages and cultures according to bourgeois moral standards (§33) is a case in point.

One response to this elitism might be: why not let everyone be a critic? While critics need not be as rare as Hume claims, this proposal is unrealistic. Of course everyone has the right to express opinions and judgements. But some people are better than others at certain things. Even in a society that invested in a high level of universal education and had equal opportunity for everybody, it is hard to see how highly trained arts specialists (academics, critics, art historians etc) would not still be necessary. Even a literate and well-informed public cannot normally match the skills of a specialist who has spent seven to ten years learning their field, and perhaps taught and researched for many years more. There is no shame in looking to specialists for the highest level of analysis, as in any other field. The question is, how we appoint them.

Another response might be: why do we even care what a bunch of critics says? This is the closing point, for example, of Noël Carroll in his essay⁵. The answer here is straightforward. We do assume that some works are better than others, i.e. that standards exist. This poses a genuine philosophical problem, and we are never going to solve it by letting every individual go their own way. Again, the question needs investigation, and, as in any other area of investigation, that requires specialists with time, resources and expertise.

A Marxist response to the tension of elitism and specialists might argue that in a society run by the proletariat instead of the bourgeoisie, our ideal critics would be drawn from a class that represents the global majority rather than a tiny vested interest. This would be a massive advance against elitism. However, this advance would need to be global to realise its potential. In the meantime, we in capitalist countries must look for more immediately achievable ways forward.

Given that there is no realistic prospect of scrapping specialism, how do we overcome the problems of elitism? Surely, by widening the discussion to be global and inclusive. By hearing the perspectives of aestheticians outside the Western world, of women, of minorities, and from outside a narrowly right-wing range of ‘acceptable’ opinion. Keeping specialists in touch with a continual global discussion beyond the confines of academia, through technology, education and democracy, would help dismantle that exclusive club.

Notes

1. Noël Carroll, ‘Hume’s Standard of Taste’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1984).
2. The first is in a footnote to ‘Of National Characters’ (1742, footnote added to 1753 edition). The second is from ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ (1742).
3. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2001).
4. Richard Shusterman, ‘Of the Scandal of Taste: Social Privilege as Nature in the Aesthetic Theories of Hume and Kant’, The Philosophical Forum (1989).
5. Carroll, op. cit. ‘What do I care for critics?’ says Carroll. ‘I’ll do it myself.’ As ‘one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art’ (Wikipedia), Professor Carroll is far better equipped to do this than most of us.