Decorative arts

• 1. Introduction

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  The decorative arts cover most of the objects that fill the interiors of buildings, from the chair you sit in to the cup you drink from. Their aim is twofold. An object must be beautiful, and it must also be useful. Ceramic art, metalwork, furniture, jewellery, fashion, glassware, and the many forms of textile art all belong to this family. Interior design belongs here too. Architecture, by contrast, usually sits outside the category. For centuries these crafts carried a quieter reputation than painting and sculpture. Why did a society come to rank a brushstroke above a goldsmith's labour? Who decided that a tapestry was worth less than a fresco? And what happened when a generation of designers refused to accept that ranking at all? The answers move across continents and centuries, and they reveal how much of what we call art has depended on who was holding the pen.

• 2. Lines Drawn After The Renaissance

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  Post-renaissance art of the West is where the split between the decorative and the fine arts first became meaningful. The fine arts were defined as painting, drawing, photography, and large-scale sculpture, works made for their aesthetic quality and their power to stimulate the intellect. Everything aimed at beauty plus function fell on the other side of the line.

  Islamic art exposes how local that line really is. In many periods and places it consists entirely of the decorative arts, often built from geometric and plant forms. The art of many traditional cultures works the same way, placing its most valued works squarely in decorative media. For appreciating Chinese art the distinction is not very useful, and the same holds for early Medieval art in Europe.

  Early Medieval Europe had fine arts in the modern sense, including manuscript illumination and monumental sculpture. Yet the most prestigious works tended to be goldsmith work, cast metals such as bronze, or techniques like ivory carving. Large-scale wall-paintings were less regarded, crudely executed, and rarely mentioned in contemporary sources. They were probably treated as an inferior substitute for mosaic, which for that period must count as a fine art. In recent centuries mosaics have drifted toward being seen as decorative instead.

  Tapestry suffered a similar reversal. Late medieval and Renaissance royalty regarded it as the most magnificent artform, and it was certainly the most expensive. The term ars sacra, meaning sacred arts, is sometimes applied to medieval Christian work in metal, ivory, textiles, and other valuable materials, though not to rare secular pieces from the same period.

• 3. What Survives And What Is Melted

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  Works in metal, and above all in precious metals, were liable to be recycled the moment they fell from fashion. Owners often treated them as repositories of wealth, ready to be melted down whenever extra money was needed. This habit has quietly distorted how later generations understand whole cultures.

  Illuminated manuscripts tell the opposite story. They survived at a much higher rate, especially in the hands of the church, because there was little value in their materials and they were easy to store. The result is a record skewed by the modern privileging of fine visual arts media over others, combined with the very different survival rates across materials. We do not see the past as it was. We see the part of it that nobody had reason to destroy.

• 4. Vasari And The Cult Of The Hand

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  Vasari and other Italian theorists carried the promotion of the fine arts into European thought during the Renaissance. The values they championed, exemplified by the artists of the High Renaissance, placed little weight on the cost of materials or the quantity of skilled work behind a piece. What mattered instead was artistic imagination and the individual touch of the hand of a supremely gifted master, names like Michelangelo, Raphael, or Leonardo da Vinci. In doing so they revived, to some extent, the approach of antiquity.

  Most European art during the Middle Ages had run on a very different set of values. There, both expensive materials and virtuoso displays in difficult techniques had been highly valued, the opposite of Vasari's priorities.

  China shows that the two outlooks need not compete. For many centuries both co-existed there. Ink wash painting, mostly of landscapes, was produced largely by and for the scholar-bureaucrats known as the literati, and was meant above all as an expression of the artist's imagination. Other major fields, including the very important Chinese ceramics made in effectively industrial conditions, followed a completely different set of artistic values entirely.

• 5. England's Revolt

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  Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris supplied the writings that inspired the Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century born in England. It marked the beginning of a greater appreciation of the decorative arts throughout Europe, narrowing the lower status those works had long carried against fine art.

  Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, the English architect and designer, gave the movement an institution. In 1882 he organized the Century Guild for craftsmen, championing the idea that there was no meaningful difference between the fine and decorative arts. Converts came from professional artists' ranks and from the intellectual class as a whole, and they helped carry the ideas outward.

  The law eventually followed the taste. Until the Copyright Act 1911, only works of fine art had been protected from unauthorized copying. The 1911 Act extended the definition of an artistic work to include works of artistic craftsmanship. A craft could now be defended in court the way a painting always had been.

• 6. Reopening The Question

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  The 1970s brought a formal challenge to the old view of decoration as a lesser art. Writers and art historians such as Amy Goldin and Anne Swartz pressed the case directly. By the close of the 20th century the argument for a single narrative in art had lost traction, worn down by post-modernist irony and by growing curatorial interest in street art and in ethnic decorative traditions.

  New York galleries hosted the next turn. The Pattern and Decoration movement appeared there in the 1980s. Though short-lived, it opened the way to a more inclusive evaluation of the value of art objects, the kind of reassessment that earlier centuries would have resisted.

• 7. Objects Made One's Own

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  Mass production and consumerism create a peculiar problem. Individuals are forced to accept mass-produced identical objects in their lives, yet many still try to build or maintain a lifestyle and to construct their own identity. Colin Campbell, in his piece The Craft Consumer, describes how this is done by selecting goods with specific intentions in mind, in order to alter them.

  The foreign object does not stay foreign for long. Rather than accepting it for what it is, the owner incorporates and changes it to fit a personal lifestyle and set of choices, a process Campbell calls customizing. One route is to change a common object's external appearance through decorative techniques, seen in decoupage, art cars, the truck art of South Asia, and IKEA hacking. The same impulse that once filled a cathedral with goldsmith work now reshapes a flat-pack shelf, proof that the decorative arts never stopped being a way for people to make the made world their own.