Art

• 1. Introduction

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  Art has no generally agreed definition, and yet a shell engraved by Homo erectus has been dated to between 430,000 and 540,000 years old. That single object opens a question philosophers have never closed. What counts as art, and who gets to decide? The philosopher Richard Wollheim called the nature of art "one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture." His phrasing is precise. Art is a diverse range of cultural activity built around works that draw on creative or imaginative talents. We expect those works to evoke a worthwhile experience, through emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical skill, or beauty. But its interpretation has varied greatly across history and across cultures. This documentary follows the word itself, from a Latin root meaning skill to a urinal placed in a gallery. Along the way it asks who was allowed to see art, why it has so often caused offense, and whether the category we now take for granted is barely two hundred years old.

• 2. Skill And Craft

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  Until the 17th century, the word art referred to any skill or mastery. It was not differentiated from crafts or sciences. English carries that older sense forward in words like artifact, artificial, artifice, the medical arts, and the military arts, all tied to the Latin meaning of skill or craft and to the word artisan. For Leonardo da Vinci, art was a manifestation of skill, neither more nor less than his other endeavors. Rembrandt's work is now praised for its ephemeral virtues, yet his contemporaries most admired its virtuosity. The adroit performances of John Singer Sargent were, at the turn of the 20th century, both admired and viewed with skepticism for their manual fluency. Around the same time Pablo Picasso was completing a traditional academic training at which he excelled. A common view holds that the elevated sense of the word requires creative expertise, whether technical ability, originality of style, or both. Larry Shiner, in The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, traces how the modern system of fine art was built. Ancient Greek society did not possess the term art at all. It had techne, which included painting, sculpting, and music, but also cooking, medicine, horsemanship, geometry, carpentry, prophecy, and farming.

• 3. Philosophers In Dispute

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  Plato wrote several dialogues that tackle questions about art, and in them his Socrates is hard to pin down. In the Phaedrus, at 265a to c, Socrates speaks approvingly of divine madness, including the inspiration of the muses, drunkenness, eroticism, and dreaming. In the Republic he wants to outlaw Homer's great poetic art, and laughter as well. The dialogue Ion suggests that Homer's Iliad functioned in the ancient Greek world as the Bible does in the modern Christian world, as divinely inspired literary art offering moral guidance if properly interpreted. Aristotle treated epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, Dithyrambic poetry, and music as mimetic or imitative art. Each varies by medium, object, and manner. Music imitates through rhythm and harmony, dance through rhythm alone, and poetry through language. Comedy imitates men worse than average, tragedy men slightly better. Aristotle believed imitation is natural to mankind and gives humans an advantage over animals. Leo Tolstoy identified art as an indirect means to communicate from one person to another. Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood advanced the idealist view that the work of art exists in the mind of the creator. Kant's theory of art as form was later developed by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. George Dickie offered an institutional theory, defining a work of art as any artifact on which a qualified person, acting for the social institution called the art world, has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.

• 4. The Deep Human Record

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  Eight white-tailed eagle talons, about 130,000 years old, bear cut marks and abrasion suggesting Neanderthals manipulated them, possibly as jewelry. Tiny drilled snail shells roughly 75,000 years old were found in a South African cave. Containers that may have held paints date back as far as 100,000 years. The oldest piece of art found in Europe is the Riesenhirschknochen der Einhornhöhle, dating back 51,000 years and made by Neanderthals. Sculptures, cave paintings, rock paintings, and petroglyphs from the Upper Paleolithic, roughly 40,000 years old, survive, though their precise meaning is often disputed because so little is known about the cultures that made them. The first undisputed sculptures, like the Venus of Hohle Fels, come from the Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura UNESCO World Heritage Site. There the oldest non-stationary works of human art were found, carved animal and humanoid figurines, alongside the oldest musical instruments yet unearthed, with artifacts dated between 43,000 and 35,000 BC. Many great traditions rest on the art of one of the great ancient civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Inca, Maya, and Olmec. Each developed a unique style. Greek art of this kind venerated the human physical form and built the skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions.

• 5. Styles Across The World

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  Byzantine and Medieval art of the Western Middle Ages focused on biblical and religious subjects, using gold backgrounds and glass mosaics and windows to suggest a heavenly world, with figures in idealized, flat, patterned forms. A classical realist tradition persisted in small Byzantine works, and realism grew steadily in Catholic Europe. Renaissance art emphasized the realistic depiction of the material world and developed a systematic method of graphical perspective to show recession in a three-dimensional picture space. Islamic art's rejection of iconography led to emphasis on geometric patterns, calligraphy, and architecture, and depictions of Muhammad remain especially controversial. India and Tibet emphasized painted sculptures and dance, with religious painting favoring bright contrasting colors and strong outlines. China saw jade carving, bronzework, pottery including the Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin, poetry, calligraphy, music, painting, drama, and fiction. Chinese styles are traditionally named after the ruling dynasty. Tang dynasty paintings are monochromatic and sparse, emphasizing idealized landscapes, while Ming dynasty paintings are busy, colorful, and built around storytelling. Japan also names styles after imperial dynasties, and woodblock printing became important there after the 17th century. Art has often spread through trade. Along the Silk Road, Hellenistic, Iranian, Indian, and Chinese influences mixed, and Greco Buddhist art is one of the most vivid examples of that interaction.

• 6. The Modern Break

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  The specific sense of art as an abbreviation for creative or fine art emerged in the early 17th century, where aesthetic considerations are paramount and the fine arts are separated from acquired skills such as the decorative or applied arts. The Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century produced images of a clockwork universe and politically revolutionary visions, such as Blake's portrayal of Newton as a divine geometer and David's propagandistic paintings. Romantic rejections followed, favoring emotion and individuality, exemplified in the novels of Goethe. The late 19th century brought academic art, Symbolism, impressionism, and fauvism. Japanese woodblock prints, themselves influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship, had an immense influence on impressionism. African sculptures were later taken up by Picasso and to some extent by Matisse. Theodor W. Adorno said in 1970, "It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist." Martin Heidegger, in The Origin of the Work of Art, described the essence of art through the concepts of being and truth. He argued that each new artwork added to a culture inherently changes the meaning of what it is to exist.

• 7. Who Gets To See It

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  In 1661, the city of Basel in Switzerland opened the first public museum of art in the world, the Kunstmuseum Basel. Its collection spans from the early 15th century to the immediate present, with strength in works by artists active in the Upper Rhine region between 1400 and 1600. Much of the finest art has long served as a deliberate display of wealth or power, often through massive scale and expensive materials, and much was commissioned by political rulers or religious establishments. Yet high-quality art also reached wide audiences in cheap media. The ceramics of indigenous peoples of the Americas appear in a wide range of graves, and reproductive moulds spread Ancient Roman pottery and Greek Tanagra figurines to a broad market. Printmaking began in 15th-century Europe with small woodcuts, often religious, hand-colored and affordable even by peasants who glued them to their walls. At the Palace of Versailles, visitors could hire silver shoe buckles and a sword from shops outside to gain entry. The Uffizi in Florence opened entirely as a gallery in 1765, and the Musée du Louvre opened during the French Revolution in 1793. The British Museum was established in 1753. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was created by John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum. In the late 1960s and 1970s, artists tried to make art that could not be bought and sold. Joseph Beuys said it was "necessary to present something more than mere objects," and this period saw the rise of performance art, video art, and conceptual art.

• 8. The Provocations

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  Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, from 1989, is a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's own urine, and the resulting uproar led to comments in the United States Senate about public funding of the arts. Art has long been disliked, though most pre-modern controversies are dimly recorded or lost. Iconoclasm is the destruction of disliked art, sometimes for religious reasons, and aniconism is a general dislike of figurative or religious images. The Last Judgment by Michelangelo was controversial partly for nudity and the Apollo-like pose of Christ. Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, from 1863, scandalized viewers not because of the nude woman but because she sits beside men dressed in contemporary clothing. John Singer Sargent's Madame Pierre Gautreau, known as Madam X, from 1884, caused controversy over a reddish pink used for the model's ear lobe. Pablo Picasso's Guernica, from 1937, used cubist techniques and stark monochromatic oils to depict the bombing of a small ancient Basque town. In conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, an ordinary urinal from 1917, achieved considerable prominence. Tracey Emin's My Bed and Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living followed. Arthur Danto suggested in 1998 that the status of an artifact as a work of art results from the ideas a culture applies to it, rather than its inherent physical qualities. Larry Shiner put it bluntly: fine art is "not an essence or a fate but something we have made," a European invention barely two hundred years old.