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A note about these narratives: each one explains the connection between the images displayed on the course lecture pages and the content of the course. The connection is not always immediately obvious. The narratives are not a replacement for reading or class attendance; but they make an important supplement. I have not bothered to insert links to all the images on the lecture pages. I recommend that you either open two side-by-side windows so you can view both at the same time, or just print out the narrative and consult it as you view the lecture pages.
The first image is Sandy Skoglund's “Walking on Eggshells”, an installation first displayed in 1997, and more recently installed at the B & D Gallery in Milan, Italy in March, 2002. Look at it for a while, then take a minute to explore Sandy Skoglund’s web-site, and look at several of her installations. Now ask yourself what makes it possible for this kind of thing to exist. It is not a useful object, not even if the papier mache plumbing really worked; and yet it was obviously expensive to make. It is not decorative; it is not primarily intended to be beautiful. Of course it has some composition to it; and of course the two nude women are beautiful. The female nude is a classic embodiment of beauty in western art and culture as in most other cultures, and this increases the power and irony of Skoglund’s piece. But the beauty of the women is not the main point of the piece, as it might be in a classic sculpture or painting of a nude. It is an installation, a work for people to come and look at in a gallery or museum or some other exhibition space. The live models would only be present during the photographic documentation of the work. Only an especially rich (and eccentric) person would have it in their home, even without the nudes as it was exhibited in Milan. It is meant to provoke thought, wonder, laughter, to provide a memorable image with rich symbolic content that will convey a message in an open-ended way. It is surreal and magical and angry and funny all at the same time. It is Art with a capital A. I think it is wonderful. You may agree, or not. But what makes it possible? How did we get to the point where something like this would be made, and viewed, and written about?
To understand the answer, I think we need to look around at traditional non-western cultures, and go back in time in western culture to a time well before the eighteenth century, maybe even to the middle ages. The next images are all things that we might find now in an art museum. But their makers would not recognize them as what we call Art. They were artisans, craftspeople who made objects for a use. They certainly considered the look and the significance of their artifacts. But the idea that something would be made only to be looked at, with no ceremonial or religious or civic or everyday or even decorative use, would have seemed very strange to them. Of course we really don’t know about the conditions under which the Lascaux cave images were made, except that the caves on whose walls they were so carefully painted were nearly inaccessible. No one lived there, and they pretty clearly weren’t museums or art galleries! The same thing is even more obviously true of the "Cave music" - no-one knows what music was played on the very ancient flutes, horns, or in this case tuned flints that have been found. Perhaps these striking images, and the music, served as part of an initiation ritual, or as visual incantations to give hunters power over game. They do make it very clear that visual symbols and music have had a central role in human imagination and culture for many millennia. But there is no reason to think they are early examples of Art for Art’s sake.
We do know about the next images. The Torres Straits Islander mask, made from turtle shell, leather, shells and feathers, is an amazing and symbolically powerful object. Such masks have been used by the Torres islanders for male initiations and for funerary rites. This one is from the 19th century, and is on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The female figure from the Asante people is a doll. In many traditional African cultures, such dolls are given to young girls, who play with them much as do young girls the world over. By contrast with Barbie, the sexual characteristics of this doll are prominent. The doll shows the young girl all the dimensions of the woman she will grow up to be: physically strong, fertile, also strong in character, intelligent, calm and self-possessed as indicated by the facial expression. She will keep the doll with her throughout her life. It will accompany her through puberty, and serve as a fertility charm when she marries. When she is trying to get pregnant, she may carry the doll on her back to make pregnancy more likely. (See Stokstad, p. 913 for more on these customs; for a lot more, read Susan Vogel’s books on African Art). The other figures and masks serve a variety of functions. They memorialize ancestors; they are worn during rite of passage ceremonies, or as instructional aids in dances that convey the values of the tribe. They are all functional objects, familiar to everyone in the tribe (or in a few cases only to initiates in a society or group within the tribe). They are embedded in the life of a culture and help to keep that culture alive. In that respect they are far more like advertising, movies, and popular music than they are like what we think of as Art, which in our culture has a much smaller audience. Picasso recognized the strong cultural function of African masks, and their psychological power, when he was inspired by an exhibition of them to create the finished version of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He wanted to portray the attraction and fear created in him by these prostitutes. This is what he had to say about the masks that inspired him:
Men had made those masks...as a kind of mediation between themselves and the unknown hostile forces that surrounded them, in order to overcome their fear and horror by giving them a form and an image. At that moment I realized that...painting...isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this...hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires (cited in Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p 266)
Picasso’s image certainly did come to play a powerful role in western culture. Still, what he made was Art. It had no traditionally accepted use, in the way that the masks do. It remains an individual statement, one that found its way into the culture and conveyed a powerful message, but one that would also come in handy for a psychoanalyst who had Pablo as a patient.
The next three images are all mother and child images. The first is a terra cotta figure from the ancient African city of Jenne. The second is a Maddonna and Child by the early renaissance painter Giotto. The third is by Vincent Van Gogh. Even though the Jenne figure and the Giotto painting come from two different traditions and contexts, in some ways they are more like each other than either is like the Van Gogh. I am not talking about appearances here; in that respect you can see that Van Gogh is deliberately modeling his portrait of Mme Roulin after medieval and renaissance paintings of the Maddona and Child. The difference is that the Jenne clay sculptor and Giotto were both artisans, hired to make a piece of public art that would serve a civic or religious function. Individual expression on the part of these artisans was only permitted as it suited or at least did not conflict with the interests of the employer or patron. (This did leave room for individual expression by Giotto and others, but making an individual statement was not primary in what they did, as it is in modern and contemporary art. ) By contrast, Van Gogh was on his own. He may have felt a continuity with the great painters of the past; and he certainly deeply desired appreciation from his contemporaries. (In a letter to his brother Theo, he spoke of having a fire inside of him, and of longing to have someone come and sit by his fire.) But he had no established context in which these things were guaranteed to him, no matter his training and talent. Rather, it was up to him to be an innovator, to make a statement that would cause the world to take notice. Of course that’s just what he did. He was an Artist in the modern sense. He did have some success while he was alive, but as often happens it was only after his death that very many people came to sit by his fire. VanGogh, like Picasso, is making the kind of work that must be appreciated as Art. It is not supposed to have a use; in fact, if something is made for everyday use, that tends to disqualify it as Art.
Your first reading for this class is the Introduction to Larry Shiner's book The Invention of Art. In that book, Shiner argues that it was in Europe in the 18th century that Art as we know it (more precisely, “fine art”), first came to be distinguished from craftwork and (later) from popular art, commercial art and entertainment. That does not mean that no one was making paintings or sculpture or music or poems or plays before the 18th century. That is obviously not true. But like Giotto, the great artists of the Renaissance were artisans. Their work was public art, serving a civic or religious function, or it was privately commissioned portraits. It was only in the eighteenth century that a number of trends came together to form the modern institution of Art with a capital “A”. It was then that certain crafts (to begin with, painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and architecture) came to be grouped together as fine arts, and separated from mere, utilitarian craftsmanship. It was then that work began to be collected in museums and performed to silent audiences in concert halls. It was then that the idea of “taste” arose, and from it the notion of a certain sort of aesthetic appreciation and a corresponding aesthetic value that was different from any utilitarian, ceremonial, financial, sexual, religious, personal, historical, educational, or other kind of value that a work might have. Along with this went the idea of the artist as innovative genius, someone with a statement to make, someone who was not bound to rules and was not just “working for money.” That, at least, is how Shiner sees things. I find his analysis very persuasive. Read Shiner carefully, and see if he convinces you as well. You don’t have to agree with him (or with me) to do well in this course. But Shiner’s thesis will play a large role in the course, since nearly every question about the arts looks different if you take his point of view.
The next images show the complex interaction between fine art, popular art, commercial art, and craft in the modern world. The first image is a photograph of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space. Brancusi made many versions of this bird; it derives from a magical bird that figures in Romanian folk-lore, and it was one of his favorite images. As you can see, the thumbnail is of one version (brass, found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and the large image is of another version (marble, found at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Brancusi’s initial sculptures of this theme were more birdlike, the later ones more and more streamlined. Brancusi himself said that he was trying to “discover the means of finding for each subject the key form that would powerfully sum up the idea of that subject. ... [T]his directed me to a non-figurative art....” (Quoted in Lipsey, An Art of Our Own, Boston, Shambhala, 1997, p. 231). A walk through an exhibit of his work (go if you ever get the chance!) shows the process of simplification and distillation of an essence that Brancusi went through with each of his images. Brancusi is one of the modern greats. He is clearly an artist in the modern sense. But put his work next to that of the contemporary architect and designer Michael Graves. This teakettle, available at Target and viewable on my stove at home, sells for $29.99. This is high design for a mass market. It is an item for everyday use; yet it has the same spirit and design sense as the Brancusi bird. The style of the teakettle clearly comes from modern abstract sculpture; to me, it feels a lot like Brancusi. If Bird in Space is Art, but the teakettle is not, why is that? The next example is even clearer. Here is a painting by the famous Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian. Next is a show of dresses by Yves St. Laurent. The one is high modern art, coming out of a highly developed philosophy and a sense that a painter must present the pure essence of the world in his work. The other is high fashion. But is it possible that Mondrian plays better as design than as profound art? Or is the fashion show a rip-off? In any case, the sharp line between Art and design suddenly gets fuzzy when you see something like this.
The next two images compare an example of fine art from the time when fine art was being invented, with a modern example that is trying to fill the same need. The difference in quality is painfully clear. Next to Constable, Thomas Kincaid's painting looks cheap, amateurish, gaudy. Kincaid’s fans call him the painter of light; but Constable’s subtle use of light has so much more soul. The image is not here, however, for the purpose of bashing Kincaid. Rather, it points to the sharp separation between fine and popular art that has taken place in recent times. In the early nineteenth century, Constable was high art, but high art was still relatively accessible to ordinary viewers. At the present time, someone who painted like Constable would be thought simply to be repeating the past. But much current work by strong artists is inaccesible to a large audience. The void is filled by painters like Kincaid, who is enormously popular.
The remaining images in this session are examples of recent or current work, somewhat arbitrarily chosen, that illustrate a little of the variety of work now being made. The variety of media being used is much greater than it used to be. Two works in fluorescent light by the artist Dan Flavin express the spirit of abstract painting and sculpture in a new medium. A table set by Christa Assad is beautiful, useful, and again raises the question why such work should be distinguished from art. (The Christa Assad thumbnail links to the Clay Studio, where I saw her work last year. If she is not in their archives, search the web to find larger images and more of her work.) The next thumbnail links to the website of Damali Ayo, a contemporary performance artist much of whose work deals with issues of race. Check out some of her projects. They are edgy, often hilarious, and in my view very powerful. The last two images are by John Eric Byers, a fine art furniture maker, and John David, a wood turner. Both are exhibited in galleries, both make utilitarian objects which also seek the status of fine art, though the second object gains its humor and punch by being so obviously not useful.
Let’s return to the question raised at the beginning of this narrative. It is my contention that work like that of Sandy Skoglund, Damali Ayo, John Eric Byers and John David, like that of Van Gogh, Picasso, Mondrian, and Brancusi, could not exist if it were not for the invention of “fine art” (or to put it more simply, art for art’s sake). There are gains and losses from this invention. On the plus side, we have symphonies, museums, and the powerful painting and sculpture produced in the twentieth century. It is pretty clear that none of this would exist without an institution of “art for art’s sake”, and a corresponding custom of contemplative appreciation of works of art. The invention of Art produced these treasures of human culture. On the minus side, as the history of Art has moved forward to the present, Art and Life have almost become divorced from one another. The crafts have been diminished by the invention of Art, and the dimensions of beauty, meaning, and personal skill that were so prominent in work prior to the eighteenth century have become less common in Fine Art and less prominent in popular art. In fact, Fine Art has become so divorced from popular culture that most of what is taken seriously by art critics is of no interest at all to the general public, and much of what is preferred in popular culture is cheap and nostalgic (Thomas Kincaid’s paintings are a good example).
I don’t mean to be pessimistic. Not only does something need to change, something is changing. The walls between fine art and popular culture are neither rigid nor impermeable. The vitality of popular culture, and of traditional influences from other cultures, is constantly finding its way into the Art World, where it produces exciting results, or where sometimes it just suddenly receives Fine Art status. (Graffiti art is a good example; some of it now gets shown in galleries!) And popular culture itself continues to renew itself, and to make wonderful and powerfully aesthetic objects, completely aside from the blessing or cursing of the Art world. Later in this class we will look at some of these developments. And we will spend a lot of time thinking about what the Invention of Art means to us now. Shiner makes the point that for good or ill (probably a little of both) the distinction between Fine Art and craft, popular art, commercial art, etc. is very tenacious, and may be here to stay. Nothing shows this more clearly than the constant effort by popular singers, comic book illustrators, furniture makers, film makers and others to be considered Artists. They know that they won’t be taken seriously unless they fit into this category. Shiner does talk about the possibility of a "third system of the arts" beginning to emerge, presumably a system that would retain the best elements of the Fine Art system, along with the best elements of the time before Fine Art was divided from the crafts.
Meanwhile, you may be wondering how this "Introduction" leads into the rest of this course. Here are some ways that it does so:
1) I hope it is obvious that the course I teach is slanted by my own views, and that someone with different views would shape the course very differently. Please pay attention to this fact, and try to determine what you think about the same issues. Then you will be doing philosophy of art. I will do my best to help you do this, including helping you to argue against me and build your own case. (For example, I can direct you to lots of philosphers who have made it their business to define art and related concepts.) If you think we are neglecting something in class that needs attention, please let me know about it, and we'll see if we can work it in.
2) Because of the approach that I take, I will not be making sharp distinctions between fine art and other things. We will spend lots of time talking about "fine arts" like painting, sculpture, and classical music; but we'll also talk about movies and popular music. I welcome papers on comic book art, flower arranging, computer games and even food preparation as well as more traditional papers on paintings or concertos. All of these are arts or art products. We'll have special ways of paying attention to the arts in this class, and we'll spend some time getting clear on what they are. But the field of legitimate objects of attention is very wide.
3) For the same reason, I discourage critical essays and projects whose goal is to prove that something is art. Instead, assume that what you are talking about deserves attention as art. Focus on what the thing is, and what you think is special or interesting about it. If you feel moved to prove that something is art, come talk to me. I can cure you! Seriously, if this is so I'm pretty sure you have some worthwhile points to make. Come talk with me, and I'll help you find those points and find ways to make them.
Questions for reflection:
There’s a lot to think about here. Here’s a question: Could we break down the distinction between Fine Art and other things, and go back to recognizing musicians, painters, wood-carvers, sculptors, poets, and so on as skillful artisans who make things to enhance our lives? What would our lives and our society look like if we did this?
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