Press enter after choosing selection

What Is Art?

What Is Art? image
Parent Issue
Month
July
Year
1995
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held By
Agenda Publications
OCR Text

Since the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment forthe Humanities (NEH) were established in 1965 arts organizations of all sorts have multiplied and spread throughout the U.S. Even in 1965 there was opposition to governmental arts funding, and in the last 15 years the reaction against the growth of the Federal government has focused on the NEA and NEH as obvious targets for cuts. What the endowments have been funding is high culture, high art, fine art, art with a capital "A." Current forms of low or popular art like the movies, TV, pop music, posters and statues of the Big Boy flourish like weeds without any govemmental support. What is different about Art that makes it worthy of special support? (Traditionally governments have used art for entirely practical applications of state and religious propaganda, but this is not supposed to be the reason for U.S. arts funding.) If Fine Art is just the elitist version of entertainment, d ecoration, and propaganda then perhaps it should be left to sink or swim in the sea of ordinary commerce while progressive forces fight for more important things like the ecology and economie justice. How you define Art determines what makes it special. Yet if you ask people what Art is you find a dering variety of answers. I have heard everything from the assertion that "real Art" is only the thinnest slice of purely original work within the accepted genres of Art, to the broad statement that "Art is Life." Some of this is attributable to ignorance, but even trained art professionals can have widely differing views. How can this community express why government arts funding is correct if it can't even agree on what Art is? This disagreement is also based in another question: Is Art still a valid category? When the category of Fine Art was established in the 18th century it was restricted to five artforms: Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Music. Before that, from classical times, the categories of human arts (skills) had been divided into "liberal arts" and "servile arts"(or mechanical arts). Liberal arts were those which were thought of as free from work, meaning manual labor, while the servile arts depended on labor. The skills of philosophers, mathematicians, rhetoricians or poets resided in their minds, not their hands. Painters and sculptors (no matter how famous), whose skill was in their hands, were not respected as equal to intellectuals. When painters and other visual artists began to achieve stardom in the Renaissance, they still missed this intellectual status, so they began to make arguments that their arts should be thought of as liberal arts. Leonardo DaVinci, for example, argued plaintively that painting was a science like astronomy, that painting is philosophy, and that painting is like poetry. The comparison to poetry tumed out to be the most powerful in the long run because in the 17th century those arts which depended on taste, like poetry and painting, were more firmly differentiated from those which could rely on scientific f act, like mathematics and astronomy. The argument over which tastebased arts should be given the intellectual respect of the Liberal Arts followed. Gardening and cooking, serious candidates at the time, lost out, and the category of Fine Art was established with the five members listed above. Meanwhile, in the new bourgeois worid ntellectuals became paid workers like everyone else. Beginning with Kant, intellectuals were able to concieve of thinking as work, so the old categories of liberal and servile arts became meaningless. Since that time the status of Art has attracted many new candidates. In the secular humanist world the creative artist is the closest thing to God the Creator, and some artists are worshiped as gods. Even when a cultural form is highly popular its practitioners still want to be thought of as Artists. The novel, for example, was a low form of popular entertainment in the time of Dickens, but by the end of the 1 9th century authors such as Henry James were arguing that their form should be thought of as a fine art. Dance, photography, film, jazz, rock and roll, co mie books, potte ry, weaving, industrial design and others have all been added to the list. But not everyone's list is the same, and within each medium everyone draws their own line as to where schlock ends and real art begins. A large group would say that the sentimental narrative painting of Norman Rockwell is absolutely not art while Andy Warhol's screen prints are, but another large group holds the exact opposite view. This is not just a matter of taste, it is a matter of definition . When some people even go so far as to say that "Art is Life," they cali into question the whole category, because then there is no distinction between Art and anything else. For example, people with this view definitely include cooking and gardening as fine arts. They often would include natural objects like driftwood, disregarding the very root of the word, "ars," the Greek word for human skill which is also the root of "artificial," "artifact," and so on. By the same token, when a major fine arts worker like Joseph Beuys proclaims that everyone is an artist, what is the difference between Artist and Homosapiens? Should everyone in the country be on the arts dole? Does "Art" really mean anything anymore, or as a category is it just as defunct as Liberal Art? ■ We began preparing for this special Art issue of AGENDA by asking everyone in sight to write about "What is Art (and is it still a valid category) ?" All the writers here happen to be artists. This first essay provides a context for the question while the others show a few of the many thoughts that such a big question can provoke.

Article

Subjects
Agenda
Old News