Chapter 3
In this article, philosophy professor David Clowney (Rowan University) explores some implications of the view of Larry Shiner that fine art is a modern invention. He briefly summarizes Shiner’s main thesis and defends it against some misunderstandings and objections that have appeared in the literature.
This is a little reworked version of the complete article that appeared in Contemporary Aesthetics in 2008. The complete original article can be found here.
In The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (cited hereafter as TIA), Larry Shiner claims that Art with a capital A, Fine Art, was invented in the west in the eighteenth century [1]. The claim is not original with him; he credits Paul Oskar Kristeller’s essay The Modern System of the Arts [2] as the inspiration for his work.
Others have made this claim as well, among them Pierre Bourdieu [3], Paul Mattick [4], and Terry Eagleton [5]. What Shiner has added is a detailed proof of the Kristeller claim using the methods of intellectual, social, cultural, and art history.
In brief, the thesis is this:
There was a traditional “system of the arts” in the West before the eighteenth century. (Other traditional cultures still have a similar system.) In that system, an artist or artisan was a skilled maker or practitioner, a work of art was the useful product of skilled work, and the appreciation of the arts was integrally connected with their role in the rest of life. “Art,” in other words, meant approximately the same thing as the Greek word techne (τέχνη), or in English “skill”, a sense that has survived in phrases like “the art of war,” “the art of love,” and “the art of medicine.”
The usefulness of an art and its products was not limited to the merely utilitarian or decorative (e.g. , cooking, clothing, shelter, personal adornment, or warfare), but also included religious worship, cultural instruction and celebration, memorializing rulers, marking rites of passage, entertainment, and many other functions that linked it with intellectual and cultural life.
Artisans were often honored in this older system, depending on the nature of their craft (painting ranked higher than the writing of plays), and they were certainly able to express themselves individually and make profound statements through their work, as Michelangelo and Shakespeare did. Nevertheless they practiced a craft, and self-expression was limited to the bounds set by their accountability to their patrons or employers, or in Shakespeare’s case, by what the theater audience would pay to see (TIA, pp. 47-52).
Thus, in the old system, what we call the crafts (e.g., weaving, stonemasonry, ceramics) were more highly honored and were taken more seriously than now, and what we call the arts (theater, painting, musical composition and performance, dance, etc.) were treated more like crafts than they are now.
Modern ideas of art had not yet developed. Beauty, in the traditional system, was both highly prized and so strongly connected with utility that Saint Thomas Aquinas thought an artifact could not be beautiful if unsuited to its ordinary use. He gives the outlandish example of a glass saw which, he says, could not be beautiful because it would be useless (Summa Theologica I-II, 57, 3c, cited in TIA , p. 34).
Naturally Aquinas never imagined work like that of contemporary glass artist Rick Beck, who has made his reputation with enormous, useless and (to my eye) often quite beautiful cast glass saws, screwdrivers, nuts, bolts and the like. Beck’s work is an excellent example of the kind of thing that could never have existed under the traditional system of the arts.
What Shiner calls the modern system of the arts came together in the eighteenth century partly in connection with the development of a market for art among the growing middle class. In the new system, Fine Art (art with a capital “A”) was divided from the crafts as the appropriate object of refined taste, and usefulness became rather a negative than a positive feature for a work of art. Art for Art’s sake, the Artist as Visionary Genius, and the unique Aesthetic Attitude/Experience emerged as the distinguishing features of Fine Art.
New institutions devoted to the arts, such as galleries, museums, concert halls and libraries, were a central part of the new system. The public had to learn that these were places where one must be quiet and devote one’s sole attention to the work. (TIA pp. 143-144)
Within the new system, Art was exalted, acquiring almost a religious significance by the nineteenth century, while craftwork was devalued and minimized, leaving room for the eventual emergence in the twentieth century of artists in whose work craft skills play no important role. As we have seen in Chapter One of this module, Alexander Baumgarten gave the new category of the aesthetic its name in 1738.
Kant and Schiller firmed up the philosophical definition of the aesthetic at the end of the eighteenth century, Kant famously isolating aesthetic judgment from other sorts of appreciation of a work or a landscape, and likewise providing an enduring analysis of the eighteenth century categories of the Beautiful and the Sublime.
In developing and expanding on Kristeller’s thesis, Shiner has chosen to preserve that author’s reference to a “system of the arts.” The language may bother some readers. By “system” neither Kristeller nor Shiner means anything as tight or rigorous as many philosophers have meant by the word; rather the usage is analogous to that in the term “social system”. The intent is to indicate the breadth and complexity of the arts in society, in relation to the rest of social life and culture.
The modern system has some awkwardnesses and some internal contradictions. In it all Art is assumed to be of a kind, even though in the traditional system there would be no compelling reason to suppose that the disparate activities of music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and poetry (the five original “fine arts) share a common essence, in contrast with occasional overlaps in respect to form, narrative, imitation, beauty, etc.
Arguably this assumption has directed the development of these arts (and of the others that have since been added to the group) in new ways, as well as setting possibly unsolvable challenges to aestheticians who are trying to define that common essence.
Contradictions arise most generally in regard to the relation of the arts to the rest of life, now that the modern system has forced a partial separation between the two. For example, while often claiming universal human relevance and a transcendent mission, contemporary Fine Art in the modern period has become increasingly inaccessible to most people, for whom the role claimed by art is often filled by what Clement Greenberg disparagingly called Kitsch, or by a somewhat nostalgic attachment to classic works by early moderns like Van Gogh, Cézanne and Monet that were radical more than a century ago but now feel comfortable.
In spite of such shortcomings, says Shiner, the modern system of the arts has remained both powerful and totalizing. Its standards and ideals have so taken hold of our understanding that we see the arts of the past and of other cultures through its lenses, and cannot make quick sense of the claim that it was invented in the eighteenth century. So it is not surprising that practitioners of the exiled popular arts and the crafts (furniture makers, potters, popular musicians, movie-makers, graphic novelists, video-game designers, gourmet chefs, hairdressers, and many more) regularly try to climb over the wall and be acknowledged as Artists. It’s the only way to be taken seriously.
The system responds by stretching the wall to assimilate a few of them who are deemed to have risen to the level of fine art (e.g. , Elsa Schiaparelli from among fashion designers, as reaffirmed recently by a 2003 show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), leaving the rest outside.
There has always been a resistance to the strictures of the modern system, often focusing on the charge that it separates art from life, and sometimes attempting to destroy the split between Art and the crafts (e.g. William Morris, the Bauhaus). Shiner thinks that this resistance is becoming stronger, and that the assimilationist response to it that I’ve just described may not be working so well anymore. He ends his book by speculating about the possible emergence of a third system of the arts.
[1] Shiner, Larry, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
[2] Kristeller, Paul Oskar, “The Modern System of the Arts,”. In Journal of the History of Ideas 12, 1951, 496-527, and 13, 1952, 17-46; reprinted in Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
[3] Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984; also Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
[4] Mattick, Paul, Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
[5] Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990.