It would seem that it is. But Larry Shiner claims that it was invented in the 18th century west. Let’s look carefully at this claim, and his reasons for making it, and see if we can put it together with some other things that are obviously true. It will be a good exercise in thinking about a question in the philosophy of the arts.

We’ll start by thinking about some human universals, that is, some things that so far as we know have characterized human beings everywhere for many thousands of years. Here is a list. It starts with elements that are frequently important in the arts, and moves to several arts that are themselves quite ancient.

Some human universals (all cultures, all times):
Skill, and admiration for skill
Creativity, and admiration for creativity
Spontaneity, and admiration for spontaneity
Sensory enjoyment
Pleasure, pain, disgust, satisfaction, etc.
Tension and release
Color
Sound
Shape
Texture
Speed
(and some common associations with varieties of these, determined by our
common human situation: range of heart rate, speed of walking, sleeping and
waking, dreaming, arousal and repose, function of tension and release in most life
processes, color of plants, clear sky, stormy sky, water; associations with night
and day, with seasons, with life and death, with pain and pleasure, common
human sounds and shapes, etc.)
Image making
Singing
Musical instruments
Rhythmic movement, dancing
Story-telling
Role playing
Decorating
Tool-making
Language, and skillful use of language
Rational thought
Meaning
Symbolic activity
Emotional expression through non-verbal means (gestures, movements, sounds, images)

Both painting and sculpture are very ancient: The cave paintings at Chauvet in southeastern France are about 31,000 years old. Check the lions; the drawing technique is quite sophisticated. The same goes for the carved miniature statues and the jewelry made by the same Aurignacian culture. Check the Chauvet site for some examples. The Woman of Willendorf is c. 24,000 years old; her very fat body is obviously that way on purpose, though no-one is sure exactly what the purpose was. Most recent find of a similar figurine, with similar physical features, in place of a head a ring for hanging around the neck; 35,000 years old (Conard, N.J., Nature 459, 248-252 (14 May 2009)). Other figurines from the same period have a more normal physique. http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/index.html

Ceramic art is also very ancient. Ceramic figurines found in the Pleistocene village of Dolni Vestonice, in Moravia, Czechoslovakia around 1925 have been dated to 24,000 years before the present. These include the so-called “Venus of Dolni Vestonice”, as well as animal figures and clay balls. Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel, gives a date of 14000 years ago for the first appearance of pottery vessels in Japan.

Music is also ancient. Musical instruments go back 30,000 to 50,000 years. Presumably singing is much older. Bone flutes – Jiahu, Henan province in China – 7000 to 9000 years old. Swan wing-bone flute, also one from mammoth ivory, both c. 30,000 years old. http://www.urgeschichte.uni-tuebingen.de/fileadmin/downloads/Medien/Flute/JapanTimes.pdf Disputed Neanderthal bone flute from 42,000-53,000 years ago, thighbone of a cave bear. Holes lined up right to be playable, but some argue it’s just a bone punctured when gnawed by a wolf. http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/FluteDebate.html Deer bone flute 30,000 years old. No language or stories available from these times; writing wasn’t invented until about 3200 BCE. So we don’t know what story telling, dancing, role-playing etc. was going on.

So art is universal, right? It may seem obvious, from these facts, that art in general is a human universal. The philosophy of art has often assumed that this is so, and set out to define the concept of art, to see what art has in common throughout its 30,000 year history and across its various cultural developments. Art historians have often assumed the same thing.

Wrong. Art, as we think of it, is a modern invention. While it may seem obvious that art in general is a human universal; the facts I’ve just mentioned don’t prove it, and there are some very good reasons for thinking that it is not true.

It is very true that every human culture we know of has image making, story telling, song and dance and decoration, jewelry making and play-acting, and the physical evidence proves that these things (at least the ones that leave physical evidence) are at least 30,000 years old. But throughout most of human history these have been separate skilled practices, with their own traditions and places within culture. No-one was singling them out from woodcarving, weaving, hunting, fighting, spell-casting, or cooking, and calling them Art. In fact the word “art” originally meant “skill” or “craft”. Alongside its new, modern meaning, which I’ll come to in a minute, it has kept that old meaning in modern English: we speak of the art of cooking, the art of medicine, the art of teaching, the art of training dogs or breeding horses or plastering walls.

Before the 18th century, that use of “art” was the only one there was, and no other language had a word that means what our word “art” means now. Painters and weavers and stone-cutters and potters and metal-smiths and so on were all artisans, skilled makers of useful things that were essential but also enriching to our lives. Even in Renaissance Europe and Samurai Japan and Imperial China and classical India, where such skilled crafts as music and painting had developed to such a high level of sophistication that it took years of study to become good at them, they were still seen as valuable technical skills. Artists were artisans. There was no notion that the main job of a painter or a musician was to have original ideas and develop them according to his original vision. Quite the contrary. Whatever original vision you had, you either worked it out for yourself on your own time, or you found a way to work it into what your patron commissioned you to do. Of course the greatest practitioners found a way to do just that. If you were Shakespeare, you found a way to develop your vision while entertaining the public and keeping your noble friends happy. You were in the entertainment business.

It wasn’t until the 18th century in Europe, with the rise of the middle class, that the five arts of music, poetry, painting, sculpture and architecture were separated from other crafts and became known as the fine arts. A market for these arts began to replace patronage as the way that these arts gained support, so that the “artist” became an independent entrepreneur. By the end of the 18th century, a new understanding of Art, the Artist, and the Aesthetic had developed, and was given its canonical form in the writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (The word "Aesthetic" was invented from a Greek root meaning “having to do with the senses” by another German, Alexander Baumgarten, in the middle of the 18th century.) The chief characteristics of the system were these: Art is for its own sake; it serves no utilitarian function. The Artist is free: artistic genius is not bound by rules, but spontaneously invents things that go beyond and improve on rules. The proper contemplation of Art is disinterested, in the sense that you are paying attention just to what it presents to you, and not for its usefulness, its moral lessons, or any of its other non-aesthetic features. A whole set of social institutions grew up to support this new notion of Art: museums, galleries, concert halls, reading libraries, and poetry magazines were prominent among them, as were various societies dedicated to the advancement of the Arts. As this modern idea of Art developed, it grew stronger and went deeper. The Artist came to be seen as a visionary genius, who had lessons to impart to the unenlightened mass of humanity.

You can see this picture of the artist spelled out clearly and without apology in the influential early 20th century essay by the great Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The new, modern idea of Art also stretched into the past, in the new discipline of Art History. Art historians told a story of art’s continuous development from ancient Greece to the modern west. The new idea also shaped the way that we see the artifacts and practices of other cultures past and present. Go into any great western museum, and you will see artifacts from the ancient and medieval west, as well as items from cultures around the world, all on display as art objects. The philosopher of art Arthur Danto even has an essay, “Art and Artifact in Africa”, in which he tries to lay out a way to tell when the traditional pots or baskets of an African tribe are art, and when they are just utilitarian baskets or pots (hint: you can’t tell by looking, you have to know how the tribespeople think of their pots or baskets). Someone who wants an interesting project could write a paper on the new French Musée du quai Branly. This museum opened in June, 2006, and is intended to display and celebrate the arts of tribal and traditional cultures in Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Here is a largely favorable review, but one that raises the right questions: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/801/cu2.htm You will also find a less favorable review, with pictures, in the New York Times (look it up), and from there you can network to other sites.

You will find the origins of the modern system of the arts summarized in your first reading assignment, the Introduction to Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art. It is this modern idea of Art with a capital A, art for art’s sake, art in contrast with the commercial, the useful, and the merely entertaining, that is new. And (think about it), this is what “we” have in mind when we talk about Art. This modern idea of art has spread around the world by now, so that some version of it now shapes the practice of image makers, singers, performance artists, film-makers and others in China and Iran and Brazil and Africa as well as in Europe and the United States, whether or not their arts existed before modern times. But while the modern system has now gone global, it is only about 250 years old, and in origin it is western. It is also tightly interwoven with modern capitalism, in ways that we will explore a little bit in this course. It by no means gives an accurate picture of the practices and attitudes of humans in the past toward the activities and products that we now call art.

When we try to define art, or think about whether something is art, it is the ideas of the modern system that are usually controlling our thinking. I would like to propose that we try, in this class, to escape that control, or at least to become aware of it. I’m not proposing that we go back to the seventeenth century, or jump out of modern times and into traditional Japan. That wouldn’t be possible, and we wouldn’t like the results if we could manage it. I’m also not trying to say that the modern system is bad, and that no good has come of it. I don’t believe that at all. There’s a lot of wonderful work that would not exist without the idea of Art for Art’s sake. I wouldn’t want to be without that work. The modern system has opened up a space for painters and musicians and others to work out their own visions, and (if they can) to share or even sell their work to others. I do not think that space will go away; I surely hope it won’t. But the restrictiveness and the pretensions of the modern system are another matter. It tends to exclude utilitarian objects, commercial or mass-produced objects, and “mere” entertainment (television shows, popular music, most movies). I propose that we do our best to ignore those boundaries. Also, I don’t plan to spend time in this class trying to define art; I think all that amounts to is trying to describe the assumptions of the modern system of the arts, while pretending that it is universally valid. It is hard to do (the assumptions conflict with each other); and it does more harm than good.

Art as ideology: A set of ideas and practices functions as an ideology when it conceals the true nature of what it describes and of its relation to other social realities. Paul Mattick puts it this way: “To call a discourse ideological is to read it differently than did its originators: in particular, to identify at its basis a set of assumptions not explicitly recognized by them” (Mattick 2003 p. 2). At the heart of the modern system of the arts is the idea that art is autonomous. It is valuable for its own sake; the artist, in making it, is free (sometimes at great personal cost) from the constraints of the world of money and commerce; and in contemplating it, the art appreciator experiences a kind of spiritual freedom from the mundane realities of modern life.

The fact is, of course, that art is very closely tied to money and to market forces. It is hard to miss this fact, when you see the prices for which masterpieces sell at auction, or for that matter the prices for contemporary work sold in prestigious New York galleries. Only folks who are rich, or at least upper middle class, can afford to pay such prices. Only those with a certain sort of background and education are very likely to go into art museums and galleries and look at such work. The modern system of the arts legitimates the wealth and elite status of those who are trained to appreciate its products and can afford to own them, by presenting those products as independent of money and of crass commercial interests.

So you can write me papers about movies and about tattoo artists and rappers and culinary geniuses and the Cirque du Soleil, as well as about painters and poets and composers and modern dancers. I have a few restrictions, but not many, on the kinds of things that can be fair game for discussion in the philosophy of the arts. Just don’t spend your time trying to convince me that what you are writing about is art. Instead, tell me what interests you about it. Relate it, if it seems too far afield, to some other obviously legitimate topic in the philosophy of the arts, and then get back to paying specific attention to what the thing is like that you are so interested in.

One last point. Much of what I’ve just said expresses ideas that I’ve come to in the last four or five years. I’m still working them out. I’ve been working on this course and on my website for much longer than that. I have not had time to completely rework the website or the course to accommodate these new ideas. So if some of what you read on the website, or some aspects of the organization of the course, seem inconsistent with what I’ve said here, they probably are. Perhaps you can use the inconsistency to help you think out your own more consistent picture!