Book Notes: The Invention of Art
Key Concepts and Highlights from Larry Shiner's book.
This post is weird, neither a book report nor a book review, but rather a summary of research notes relevant to my book project for future reference. Use it as you may!
What is Art?
Fine art is something people believe in, a source of comfort, an object of love, and an autonomous realm within society, to be experienced with “contemplative detachment.” [24] This is how we view art today. In Larry Shiner’s book The Invention of Art, we obtain a historical overview of the conceptualization of art through history, showing how the understanding of art has morphed continuously over the centuries into its modern form.
I find this overview incredibly important to contextualizing the evolution of art throughout the last century and how we view art today. After all, we are all born into a moment in history and our ideas are infected by the prevalent cultural notions. History gives us a wide-angle view.
Shiner’s overview shows that the ancients viewed art as something more akin to craftsmanship, and that it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that an artist meant a creator of works of what we would call fine art.
It was not until the early 19th century that fine arts were given a transcendent, spiritual role of revealing a higher truth, or healing the soul, rather than making something merely useful or entertaining. Friedrich Schiller (and others) championed the idea of the self-contained work of art and the need for a special aesthetic response to it.
Art vs. craft, artist versus artisan, aesthetic versus purpose. Grace, invention, imagination are ascribed to artist, whereas skill, rules, and monetary concerns are that of craftsperson.
“What if we wrote our history from a perspective more sympathetic to a system of art that tried to hold together imagination and skill, pleasure and use, freedom and service? From that vantage point, the construction of the modern system of art would look less like a great liberation than a fracture we have been trying to heal ever since.” [9]
Ancient View
“Art” derived from Latin “ars” and Greek “techne,” which meant any human activity performed with skill and grace. Art was not an object; art was the human ability to make or perform the work. Today this conception is more closely aligned with craftsmanship. In Greek, we do not see the modern associations that include “imagination, originality, autonomy.”
From Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics: “techne as the trained ability of making something under the guidance of rational thought.” (1140.9-10). Also see Aristotle’s poetics wherein he discusses the pleasure that the viewer experiences from ‘represented suffering.’
“The fine arts, it was now said, are a matter of inspiration and genius and meant to be enjoyed for themselves in moments of refined pleasure, whereas crafts and popular arts require only skill and rules and are meant for mere use or entertainment.” [5]
Plato, in Book 10 of The Republic, attacks imitation.
Medieval View
In the Middle Ages, the production of artworks occurred in workshops and made to the specifications of the patron or client. The artist’s signature was meant to convey the pride of craftsmanship rather than creative originality. [31] This extended even to the time of Leonardo Da Vinci, who would often perform works to meet detailed specifications.
Medieval poets were neither the modern literary artist preoccupied with originality and self-expression nor the mere craftsman applying scholastic rules. [32]
Beauty had a much wider meaning than it does today, embracing moral value and utility along with pleasing appearance. “…medievals took the view that their true beauty lay in their conformity with their purpose.” Quoted Eco 1988. [34]
Renaissance View
The Renaissance artist was not the modern conception of an autonomous artist pursuing self-expression and originality [38]. Although at this time there were improvements in the status and image of artists, such as emergence of the artist’s biography, the development of the self-portrait, and the rise of the court artist [39], in the Renaissance, artworks were far more likely to be produced cooperatively in workshops. Painters worked on decorative commissions alongside craftsmen. [43] Many contracts gave detailed instructions limiting artistic creativity.
In the Renaissance, “invention” meant “discovery, selection, and arrangement” rather than the creation of something new.
“Grace” was how an artist overcame challenges to achieve inspiration. What makes these Renaissance ideas so unlike our creative imagination is that invention, inspiration, and grace were inseparable from skill and the imitation of nature for a particular purpose. Under the restraint of “decorum,” the rule of verisimilitude (the appearance of being true or real) and appropriateness. [46]
It is important to remember that everything we see in museums from historical periods were originally made on commission and often designed to fit a specific location. In books as in museums we crop everything out that we no longer associate with the work itself. [53]
Read Alberti’s treatise.
“divine beauty”
“The greatness of Michelangelo and Shakespeare was not that they separated art from craft but that they created their incomparable pieces while holding together imagination and technique, form and function, freedom and service.” [56]
17th Century View
Art academies were established in 1563, 1600, 1648. Modern institutions such as the art museum, the secular concert, or the copyright to separate art from other cultural artifacts had yet to exist. [72]
For 17th century artists, the notion of invention was that artists discovered beauty, they did not create it. [66] The arts were seen as serving useful functions such as instruction, prestige, accompaniment, decoration, and diversion. Only a tiny elite judged works of art for their own sake.
Read Giovanni Bellori, Nicolas Boileau, and John Dryden [72] articulated “classicism,” the core belief of which was 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 and delight.
Science of perception: Descartes, Leibniz and the idea of percept (a thing we perceive but cannot separate into parts for analysis, like the color red) [74]
There was not yet a fixed category for the group of arts that included poetry, painting and music. For the modern concept of “fine arts” to be established, it required a limited set of arts, a commonly accepted term to identify the set, and some agreed upon principles or criteria for distinguishing from others. [80] The term became the “elegant / noble / higher arts” or “beaux-arts” / “polite” or “fine arts” in English. See Dubois: Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (1719).
Pleasure vs utility [82]
Charles Batteux’s The Fine Arts reduced to a Single Principle (1746) was the first attempt to use congeal a restricted set of activities as art. The goal was the imitation of beautiful nature. [83]. Batteaux provided three categories: 1) mechanical arts; 2) beaux-arts whose aim is pleasure; and 3) and those that combine utility and pleasure, like eloquence and architecture. English version: The Polite Arts; or a Dissertation on Poetry Painting Musick, Architecture, and Eloquence.
The inventive genius [84]. Does the artist follow rules as a means of achieving mastery, or does he rely on an inventive genius? Does the artist aim to any utilitarian goal with his work, or is the purpose entirely one of pleasure?
18th-19th Century View
In the eighteenth century we have the origin of the art museum, the secular concert, and literary criticism. These separated poetry, painting, and music from their traditional social functions. We also have the proliferation of books and the establishment of copyright in England in 1709. [88, 107]. Literary fine art versus works of instruction or mere entertainment. Art auctions, museums, museums to display art in a setting separate from the display of crafts. [90]
From 1737 on, the French academy began to hold annual salons that were the first regularly repeated, open, and free display of contemporary art in Europe in a secular setting. [90] [See ref: Crow.] Note that the “polite” arts had a social (class) connotation as well, as cultured middle class or nobility.
From 1740 to 1790 (50 years) the number of academies went from 10 to 100. The most notable was the British Royal Academy (1769) intended to raise the status of artists by using the French model. [101].
From 1700-1750 catalogues typically described work by subject and size, whereas after 1750 the names of painters became more important. Meanwhile, the resale of paintings through dealers and exhibitions increased the number done for the market and this led to a greater interest in the painter’s individual style and signature. Critics began stressing originality and creative expression. [103]
When the Louvre Palace was turned in to a museum, signs had to be posted asking people not to sing, joke, or play games in the galleries but to respect it as a “sanctuary of silence and meditation” [135] also [186].
Under a patronage system, the patron commissions works and often prescribes subject, size, form, materials, etc. In a market system, criteria of success is internal to the work; the external factors of the creator’s reputation and the willingness to pay by the market sets the price.
How is art made vs. how is craft made
Genius vs. rule / Inspiration and facility / Innovation and imitation / Freedom and service. By 1762, the dictionary distinguished the “artist” versus the “artisan,” pulling apart these categories [111].
“The artist would have freedom from imitation of traditional models (originality), freedom from dictates of reason and rule (inspiration), freedom from restrictions on fantasy (imagination), freedom from exact imitation of nature (creation). [112]
Imagination was once considered to be an image storing facility or a dangerous power of fantasy, but the creative imagination “has something in it like creation” [113] see Addison The Pleasures of the Imagination.
Spontaneous creativity: invention had now become subordination of facility to spontaneous creation, rather than facility being the graceful overcoming of difficulties in the imitation of nature [115].
What is Art? / How do we evaluate the success of a work?
Roger de Piles: internal unity and total impression made by a painting rather than its subject matter, message, or fitness to purpose. See Piles 1708 ref. [123].
Leibniz “possible worlds” / The artist as creator conceives of each artwork as a kind of possible world and, like God, must make this world / work an internally consistent whole. See Abrams 1958. [125]
Phillip Moritz 1785 Toward a Unification of All the Fine Arts and Letters under the Concept of Self-Sufficiency. The idea that crafts have purposes outside themselves and works of art are complete in themselves and exist only for the sake of their own internal perfection
The Aesthetic & The Sublime
Alexander Baumgarten first coined “aesthetic” in 1735 for the kind of response appropriate to the sensate discourse of poetry / sensations own logic / from the Greek aiesthesis, having to do with the senses. This does three things: it gives emotion a more important role, provided a technical term distinguished from taste, and created a special mode of knowing. The aesthetic was characterized by disinterested knowledge uniting feeling and reason. [146]
Adam Smith and David Hume argued that the primary aim of the arts is pleasure not instruction. [135]
Elements include:
Ordinary pleasure in beauty developed into a special kind of refined or intellectualized pleasure;
The idea of unprejudiced judgement became an ideal of disinterested contemplation;
The preoccupation with beauty was replaced by the sublime and eventually by the idea of the self contained work of art as creation. Or “sentiment of the heart and precision of the mind” [141] spectators are at once moved yet calm combining intellectual concentration with intense feeling (Gluck) [143]
The “sublime,” originally meaning “grandeur of effect,” became more widely used in the eighteenth century for anything in nature or art that produced an impression of overpowering greatness. The experience of something that is vast, awesome, or terrifying yet gives pleasure.
The “beautiful” was proposed to mean “charming, sympathetic, harmonious” and experienced as immediately pleasurable. The beautiful became a caricature of stereotypes of femininity. Kant’s distinction creates a clear masculine vs feminine split in sublime versus beautiful. Kant was also fairly racist in talking about who was capable of experiencing aesthetic taste.
For Kant, aesthetic taste is a pure, disinterested pleasure in which we only contemplate an object, a harmonious free play of percepts and concepts. (Separate from taste, the application of rules, pleasure or utility, which admit of an interest or desire.) [146-147] Disinterestedness is autonomous from ordinary pleasures of sense or utility, as well as science and morality.
Pleasurable yet disinterested, individual yet universal, spontaneous yet necessary, without concepts yet intellectual, without moral instruction yet a revelation of our moral nature. [147]
Kant also separated “agreeable arts” versus “fine arts.” The first are ordinary satisfactions, but the latter are pleasures of reflection. For Kant, fine art is the product of spontaneous genius; works of craft are the product of diligence and rules. Making fine art is pleasurable in itself.
The long term effect of Kant’s work has been to reinforce the separation of art, science, and morality. [147]
Schiller: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Schiller repeats some aspects of Kant. Schiller’s notion of play unites pleasure and duty, the sensuous and the spiritual. But Schiller made fine art separate from ordinary sensuality and utility, instead the disinterested contemplation of form.
Hogarth: beauty is sensuous, bodily, even erotic. Hedonist aesthetics. See Analysis of Beauty. Praise for nature and the human body which combines the intricacy of line, proportion, fitness [159]
Rosseau First Discourse
All three kinds of pleasure, aesthetic enjoyment, sex, and exercise, are implicitly grouped together, contradicting theories that separate aesthetic experience from other pleasures as something qualitatively different, higher, and distinctely non-corporeal [168] quoted from Bohls about Wollenstonecraft.
Public Art:
What violent upheavals mean for public art: see [169] and [181]. By 1830’s, art had reached a modern conception. [189] The Louve had been turned into a museum during the French Revolution.
Art became the name of an autonomous realm and a transcendent force.
Avant-garde (“advanced guard” term from French military) became a metaphor for political radicalism and advanced art. It became synonymous with modernism rather than the ‘shockingly new’ as we might understand it today.
What is wrong with the word “beautiful?” It is closely associated with academicism and traditional criteria of ideal imitation, harmony, proportion, and unity. On the other hand, it was too mixed up with everyday notions of prettiness and praise [221]
Should serious works of art embody a significant moral content? [222]
Emerson’s essay: Art
The emergence of photography, which was invented by Paul Delaroche, who said “from this day painting is dead” [229].
Ruskin: The Nature of Gothic in The Stones of Venice – influential on arts and crafts movement
See E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art: “There is really no such thing as Art…”
“Liberal arts” versus “Vulgar” arts (later “mechanical” arts) [22]. Artist versus Artifex; liberal arts versus mechanical arts
20th Century View
The meaning of arts vs crafts, 20th century:
Collingwood 1938: true art is an act of imaginative expression requiring interpretive understanding
Dewey: Art as Experience: the feeling of harmony after disequilibrium – a particularly integrated and consummate moment of such harmony
Benjamin: The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction: the aura of a modern work is secularized, its ritual aura is the aesthetic of the unique self-contained work, a kind of religion of Art [265]
Formalist movement: New Criticism
Acting as surrogate for the US government, the Museum of Modern Art supported traveling exhibitions of abstract expressionist painting as a sign of America’s creative freedom and artistic leadership [267].
Duchamp [291]
Michael Brenson: “Modernist painting and sculpture will always offer an aesthetic experience… but it is one that can now do very little to respond effectively to the social and political challenges and traumas of American life.” [296]
Is the aesthetic a detached contemplation or is it reconceived to include ordinary sensuality and purpose?
The Invention of Art
If you are intrigued by these book notes, the book by Larry Shiner can be purchased via my affiliate store.
Summary of art historical treatises for further reading:
Plato, book 10 of the Republic
Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics.
Alberti’s treatise
E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art
Descartes, Leibniz and the idea of percept
Charles Batteux The Fine Arts reduced to a Single Principle (English version: The Polite Arts; or a Dissertation on Poetry Painting Musick, Architecture, and Eloquence.)
Roger de Piles 1708
Abrams 1958 about Leibniz “possible worlds”
Phillip Moritz 1785 Toward a Unification of All the Fine Arts
Alexander Baumgarten first coined in 1735
Kant Critique of Judgement
Schiller: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
Hogarth
Rosseau First Discourse
Emerson’s essay: Art
Ruskin: The Nature of Gothic in The Stones of Venice
Wow that’s a lot of incongruous concepts to juggle! But interesting.