The English Royal Academy: Thomas Houseago courtyard exhibition
However, I shall now try and give a much more detailed answer and see if I can unpick a few issues that begin to raise their heads as I do so.
A while ago I put up a post on the etymological root of the word 'art'. I didn't go into detail, but suffice it to say that I was concerned to look back and see if a much earlier definition could be something artists could return to. At the core of my concern is the fact that I worry about whether or not the discipline I'm supposed to work within fulfils a useful function anymore, especially as its definition is as far as I can tell, quite suspect. Students I work with have an expectation that the discipline is going to help them be able to articulate things about their relationship with the world that cannot be expressed in words alone. They want to be able to understand how art can communicate their thoughts and experiences to other people and that means that in some ways the discipline has to be unpacked and has to be probed in relation to its many complex conundrums and most of all there is a need to reveal how in many ways, it has become compromised by being given a certain status within European dominated discourses about culture.
A common definition of fine art is, 'a visual art considered to have been created primarily for aesthetic and intellectual purposes and judged for its beauty and meaningfulness'. An interesting definition that I well remember having a long argument about with my school art teacher. I had just read Ernst Fischer's 'The Necessity of Art' which was written from a Marxist point of view, and in Fischer's view art could be used as a lever to help change society for the good. That's what I wanted my art to be able to do, but my teacher argued back, he said that didactic art was always by definition poor art and that only in disinterested contemplation could art be properly appreciated. I think though that he was doing what a good teacher should and by testing my understanding of Fischer's viewpoint, he was helping me frame up my own ideas.
Larry Shiner in his book The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2003) locates the invention of fine art in the 18th century: He states; “The modern system of art is not an essence or a fate but something we have made. Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred years old.” (Shiner 2003, p. 3) Shiner argues that the term fine art appeared for the first time in the 18th century when the French philosopher Charles Batteux began to use the term 'fine artwork' in his book 'Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même Principe' ("The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle") written in 1746. In this text, he uses the term 'Beaux Arts' which at the time meant meant delicate, excellent, and finely made, and you would expect it to be translated as 'beautiful', but 'Beaux' was translated into English as 'fine', which has a very different meaning. "Fine" (adj.) is a word that comes into use during the mid-13th century and was used to refer to things that were; "unblemished, refined, pure, free of impurities," also "of high quality, of choice." This derived from the Old French 'fin' meaning, "perfected, of highest quality" a term that is suggestive of boundaries between things, a way of separating out what is good, better and best, a word evolved from the Latin 'finis' "that which divides, a boundary, limit, border, end" a word we are used to seeing at the end of any French film: FIN.
The word "fine" in its current use does not so much denote the quality of the artwork, but the purity of the discipline. Hence in maths we have 'pure' maths. The decorative or applied arts, being seen in a similar way to how 'applied maths' is seen in relation to 'pure' maths. This conceptual separation is something we sometimes forget is cultural, and we need reminding that other cultures have very different ideas about this. For instance in the world of Islam, calligraphy is given the highest status within visual art disciplines. What in the West might be considered 'craft', is in many non European cultures seen as art. The notion of purity also has racial connotations, that in a post-colonial time also need to be confronted. We need to examine what is meant by this purity of 'fine' art; is it freedom from anything that debases, contaminates, or pollutes it? Is this purity some sort of ceremonial or ritual cleanliness? Is participation in the 'fine arts' a type of rite of passage? Purity can also be seen as some sort of innocence, so are we talking here of art practice being some sort of return to the Garden of Eden? What I wonder is bad about the word 'applied'?
Before the idea of a separation between high and low art, in medieval Europe an artist or artisan was a skilled maker and a work of art was the useful product of skilled work and the appreciation of the arts was integrally connected with the use value of visual thinking and imagery in relation to how the work was useful within the context for which it was made. In many ways you could argue that this is the role design and illustration take in our present society. The idea of fine art being an 18th century invention is however debatable and another argument is that the term arti di disegno, which emerged in Italy in the mid-16th century, is when the idea of art as we know it emerged. The cult of the individual artistic genius, which was an important part of the Renaissance theoretical basis for the distinction between "art" and 'craftsmanship', did though draw on classical precedents, and the names Zeuxis, Apelles, and Parrhasius have come down to us from classical Greek times as examples of artists as special people with skills that go beyond craft, so it would seem that this narrative re-emerges when a society needs it.
It is interesting to see that the term "fine art" was seen as problematic as early as the 1920s, especially by exponents of industrial design, who opposed a double standard of judgment for works of art and for useful objects. Read: Kubler, G (1962) The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of things New York: Yale Page 14.
The term 'fine art' remains in use in higher education especially in the names of colleges, faculties, and courses, such as the one I teach on. Equivalent French institutions use the term beaux-arts and the Spanish bellas artes. This reflects a particular history that sits behind European traditions in art teaching. The art academies were set up initially in Italy, and in England the Royal Academy (which of course still exists) was both the centre for teaching skills and the place whereby standards were maintained. It could be argued that one of the roles of the academies was to ensure that the social and professional standing of artists was protected. So is this why the term 'fine art' is still used? It is perhaps a last gasp form of protection for a type of activity that has often been questioned as to its status and that has a long history of seeking to elevate its status above that of a purely skill or craft based activity. If so, the Thomas Houseago exhibition held in the courtyard of the Royal Academy the other year, could therefore be read as a way of putting the Royal Academy stamp of approval on a body of work that is clearly to be now read as a continuation of the classical tradition. His work can also be read as an attempt to subvert or rethink approaches to monumental figuration, a reading that now places his sculpture within the tradition of the avant-guarde, a paradoxical tradition, as it is a tradition of the always 'new' but more importantly a tradition that only belongs to a sub-group preoccupation within a particular history of northern European art. You don't get an idea of inbuilt obsolescence for instance in cultures that were not part of the original capitalist enterprise.
It is interesting to see that the term "fine art" was seen as problematic as early as the 1920s, especially by exponents of industrial design, who opposed a double standard of judgment for works of art and for useful objects. Read: Kubler, G (1962) The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of things New York: Yale Page 14.
The term 'fine art' remains in use in higher education especially in the names of colleges, faculties, and courses, such as the one I teach on. Equivalent French institutions use the term beaux-arts and the Spanish bellas artes. This reflects a particular history that sits behind European traditions in art teaching. The art academies were set up initially in Italy, and in England the Royal Academy (which of course still exists) was both the centre for teaching skills and the place whereby standards were maintained. It could be argued that one of the roles of the academies was to ensure that the social and professional standing of artists was protected. So is this why the term 'fine art' is still used? It is perhaps a last gasp form of protection for a type of activity that has often been questioned as to its status and that has a long history of seeking to elevate its status above that of a purely skill or craft based activity. If so, the Thomas Houseago exhibition held in the courtyard of the Royal Academy the other year, could therefore be read as a way of putting the Royal Academy stamp of approval on a body of work that is clearly to be now read as a continuation of the classical tradition. His work can also be read as an attempt to subvert or rethink approaches to monumental figuration, a reading that now places his sculpture within the tradition of the avant-guarde, a paradoxical tradition, as it is a tradition of the always 'new' but more importantly a tradition that only belongs to a sub-group preoccupation within a particular history of northern European art. You don't get an idea of inbuilt obsolescence for instance in cultures that were not part of the original capitalist enterprise.
There is love in making. As a human being becomes more and more familiar with a material, gradually it feels as if like the policeman in Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman', the maker and the material exchange atoms. This happens whether you are an artist or a craftsperson and is probably far more deeply significant than the use value of the two words 'fine' and 'art'. The slur on craft as not being as important as art is a poor reflection on theory and theoreticians and I suspect this attitude comes back to class distinctions and that people who work with their hands are never really understood by people that don't.
I would like to think that the course I work on begins with an understanding of the importance of the hands, touch and thinking through materials, but again words come to argue with me. What I know with my hands, what if feel through my physical body, can be very different to what I know or understand intellectually or is defined by words. Fine art? Hmmm, I'm not sure, lets go back and remind ourselves of an earlier idea.
In my earlier post on the etymological root of the word 'art' I tried to explore it's Proto-Indo-European root. The word/sound 'rt' in that language was associated with a dynamic process of universal creation. From ‘rt’ would eventually evolve English words such as right, rhetoric, worth, rite and ritual. 'Rt' was also associated with concepts of ‘creation’ and ‘of beauty’ but also moral and aesthetic correctness. 'Rt' was concerned with what was 'right'. It also referred to first or original things, so therefore it was associated with creation and what was created. What was beautiful was linked with order and ideas of moral and aesthetic correctness. Notice how all these meanings float around each other, our need for a precise definition has no traction here, because this is not a world of binary opposites or defined differences, but a world of constant emergence. It was also a world where words were still sounds, 'rt' a sound slipping between the whistle of wind in the trees, frogs croaking and water babbling in a stream at your feet.
The admonition to seek what is right and at the same time to develop structures that in themselves express some sort of 'rightness' would seem to be a good thing to respond to. However for each generation what is right is something that needs to be decided upon. At one time it seemed right that man should have dominion over everything.
'And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth'. Genesis 1:26
We now see that this was not a good idea and realise that we should be working in harmony with the Earth, and that thinking we had dominion over it has led to our pollution of the very atmosphere that we rely on to breathe.
So "fine art' is perhaps not so fine and 'art' not so simply defined. But as we move beyond definitions perhaps we can become released from them, and this allows us to make of these things, like life itself, whatever we need to make of them. Not long ago if a baby was born and its genitalia failed to be clearly masculine or feminine, it would be taken away and operated upon to ensure that it was either one or the other. That sort of binary distinction was and still is the product of a society that has rigid boundaries around itself and its various views of what is right and wrong. The same society that has attempted to define art perhaps forgets the concept's roots in 'rt' a tiny word that is big enough to carry a much grander and wonderful set of meanings on its very broad shoulders. As I pointed out at the end of my post on the word 'art' and its etymological roots, we need to perhaps think of art practice as a way to reveal the dynamic processes that lie behind how things fit together. It may also be possible to rethink the use of art as part of a ritual designed to re-attune ourselves to an ever unfolding act of creation and in doing so, allow us to embrace our embeddedness into nature.
Reference
Shiner, L. (2003) The Invention of Art: A Cultural History Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Pouring water More observations on the Third Policeman and art theory
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