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)
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| Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait, 1500 |
- 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.
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.
- Around 1680-1750: elements of emerging modern system became integrated.
- Around 1750-1800: definitive separation of fine art from craft, artist from artisan, aesthetic from other experience.
- Around 1800-1830: consolidation; art becomes an autonomous spiritual domain; the vocation of artist is sanctified; the aesthetic replaces taste.
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’.
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:
- (Most important) Ordinary pleasure in beauty → a special kind of refined and intellectualised pleasure.
- Idea of unprejudiced judgement → an ideal of disinterested contemplation.
- Preoccupation with beauty → the sublime and the idea of the self-contained work of art as creation.
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.
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