The arts

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The arts begin in the dark. Deep inside caves of the Upper Palaeolithic, prehistoric humans pressed pigment to stone and left behind images that have outlasted everything else about their makers. Those marks are among the oldest evidence we have of people doing something that had no obvious use, no function for survival, only the impulse to register what they saw and felt. From those cave walls to the rituals of ancient and contemporary life, to the films that fill modern screens, one thread runs unbroken. Humans keep making things that embody their shifting relationships with each other and the world.

  What we call the arts is a vast range of practices built on creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. They are at once dynamic and constant, a feature of human life that has grown into increasingly stylized and intricate forms through sustained study, training, and theorizing within particular traditions. But almost nothing about them is settled. People argue over what even counts as art, over how many branches it has, over whether a video game or a forged banknote belongs in the conversation. This documentary follows those arguments. It asks how the arts came to be sorted into branches, why critics and creators distrust each other, what happens when separate art forms fuse into one work, and how something as personal as a painting becomes a matter of politics and morality.

• 2. The Three Branches

  ›

  Three main branches organize the sprawl of the arts: visual arts, literature, and performing arts. The first gathers architecture, ceramic art, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpture. Literature holds fiction, drama, poetry, and prose, though in much of the world it also lives out loud, in epic, legend, myth, ballad, and folktale carried by the voice rather than the page. The performing arts cover dance, music, and theatre, disciplines defined by the fact that a human being must perform them for them to be experienced at all.

  Sculpture shows how a single branch can transform from the inside. It is the visual art that works in three dimensions, one of the so-called plastic arts. Its durable processes once meant carving, the removal of material, and modelling, the addition of material like clay, in stone, metal, ceramic, and wood. After modernism, those constraints fell away almost entirely, leaving sculptors free to use nearly any material or process they chose.

  Painting carries a different kind of openness. It is treated as a form of self-expression, capable of drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or pure abstraction. Some modern painters refuse to stop at paint. Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer have worked sand, cement, straw, wood, and even strands of hair into their surfaces to build texture, dragging the raw material of the world into the frame.

  Architecture stretches the branch in the opposite direction, toward use. It is the art and science of designing buildings and structures, sometimes reaching out to urban planning and landscape, sometimes narrowing to a single piece of furniture. An architect must answer to feasibility and cost for the builder while serving function and beauty for the people who will live inside the result. That double duty hints at a larger split running through the visual arts, between art made to be useful and art made to be nothing but itself.

• 3. Fine Versus Functional

  ›

  The applied arts apply design and decoration to everyday, functional objects to make them pleasing to look at. Industrial design, illustration, commercial art, graphic and fashion and interior design all fall under this heading. The term exists in deliberate contrast to fine art, which is defined as work that aims to produce beauty or intellectual stimulation but serves no primary everyday function. In practice, the guide admits, the two constantly overlap.

  Ceramic art lives right on that seam. Made from ceramic materials, it takes the shape of pottery, tiles, figurines, sculptures, and tableware, and some of it is treated as fine art while the rest is called decorative, industrial, or applied. The same fired clay that a critic might hang in a gallery can also turn up in an archaeological dig as an artefact, or roll off a line in a ceramic factory. In a one-person studio, a single potter producing studio pottery occupies yet another category. By convention, glass and mosaics made from glass tesserae are kept out of the ceramic family entirely.

  Photography draws its own borders by purpose. Photography as an art form means images created according to the creative vision of the photographer, and it defines itself against its neighbours. On one side sits photojournalism, the visual account of news events. On the other sits commercial photography, whose job is to advertise products and services. The line is not in the camera. It is in the intent, and intent, as the arts keep proving, is exactly the thing people cannot agree on.

• 4. Counting The Arts

  ›

  In Ancient Greece, art and craft were a single word, techne, with no clean line between making something beautiful and making something useful. Greek art brought a veneration of the animal form and the skill to render musculature, poise, and anatomically correct proportions. Roman art took the gods and depicted them as idealized humans, each marked by a distinguishing feature, like the thunderbolt that identifies Zeus. The way a civilization counts and ranks its arts turns out to say as much about the civilization as about the art.

  Medieval Europe sorted knowledge before it sorted pictures. The liberal arts taught in medieval universities ran through the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, then the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, the four mathematical arts. Music sat among the sciences. In that same period, the dominant church insisted that art express Christian themes, because church and state overlapped so completely that religious subject matter was less a choice than a requirement.

  Different traditions drew the boundaries of representation in different places. Asian art, in the manner of Western medieval art, concentrated on surface patterning and local colour defined by an outline, a method visible in the art of India, Tibet, and Japan. Islamic art took the opposite path in religious contexts, avoiding the representation of living beings, particularly humans and animals, and turning instead to calligraphy and geometrical design.

  The modern count settled, loosely, on seven. The traditional Seven Arts are painting, architecture, sculpture, literature, music, theatre, and filmmaking, with some forms understood as derived from others. Drama is literature with acting. Dance is music expressed through motion. A song is music joined to literature and the human voice. Even seven has not held. In Francophone scholarship television is sometimes called the eighth art and comics the ninth, le neuvieme art, while a field like gastronomy hovers at the edge, only sometimes counted as art at all.

• 5. What Counts As Art

  ›

  Marcel Duchamp's Fountain sits at the centre of the twentieth century's classificatory disputes about art, the running argument over whether a given object even qualifies. It keeps strange company on that list. Cubist and Impressionist paintings once provoked the same doubt, as did the movies, J. S. G. Boggs' superlative imitations of banknotes, conceptual art, and video games. The arts, by definition, stay open to being continually redefined.

  Conceptual art pushed that openness to its limit. When the term took hold in the 1960s, it named a strict, focused practice in which the idea mattered more than aesthetics or material, often presented as plain text that defied every traditional visual criterion. The meaning then drifted. Through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize in the 1990s, conceptual art became, in popular British usage, a catch-all for any contemporary work that skipped the traditional skills of painting and sculpture.

  Video games arrived as the newest contested case. They are multidisciplinary works carrying uncontroversial artistic elements like visuals and sound, plus an experience that emerges from their interactivity, and the culture around them argues openly about whether they are art and whether their developers, AAA or indie, are artists. Even insiders disagree. Hideo Kojima, a designer regarded as a gaming auteur, argued in 2006 that games are a type of service rather than an art form.

  Institutions began answering the question anyway. In 2011 the National Endowment for the Arts folded video games into its definition of a work of art. A year later, in 2012, the Smithsonian American Art Museum mounted an exhibit called The Art of the Video Game. The same medium its own famous creator declined to call art was being hung on the walls of a national museum.

• 6. When Forms Combine

  ›

  Opera hides its nature in its name. The word is Italian for works, plural, because the form fuses many disciplines into one experience. A traditional opera leans on sets, costumes, acting, a libretto, singers, and an orchestra all at once, none of them sufficient alone. Some art does not stay in its branch. It binds with others until the seams disappear.

  Richard Wagner refused to call his operas operas. He saw how many disciplines collapsed into a single work and named the result Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of the arts, sometimes rendered as music drama, insisting that the literary and theatrical parts mattered as much as the score. His cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, The Ring of the Nibelung, stands as his example of that fusion. Classical ballet had reached for something similar far earlier, emerging in the 17th century as orchestral music joined to dance.

  John Cage stretched the idea until the category itself wobbled. Many regard him as a performance artist, though he preferred to be called a composer, even as he refused to write for traditional ensembles. His 1940 piece Living Room Music is a quartet for unspecified instruments, in practice the non-melodic objects found in an ordinary living room, which is how it earned its title. Performance art of this kind can be scripted or unscripted, random or carefully organized, and it can pull the audience itself into the work, leaving the line between maker and spectator as unstable as every other line the arts refuse to hold still.

• 7. Critics And Power

  ›

  Critics of the Impressionists' early work are now the ones remembered with ridicule. Art criticism, the discussion and evaluation of art, usually judges in the language of aesthetics, the theory of beauty, while chasing a rational basis for appreciation it may never reach beyond the prejudices of its own moment. Time keeps overturning its verdicts. Both Impressionism and Cubism were named as insults by critics, the slur later worn by the artists as a badge of honour, its original sting forgotten. The relationship stays uneasy, because artists generally need positive opinions to have their work seen and bought, even as those opinions age badly.

  Alexander Pushkin shows how quickly aesthetic judgement turns political. A well-regarded writer, he drew the irritation of Russian officialdom and of Emperor Alexander I, who wanted a good servant of the state extolling conventional virtues. Instead Pushkin produced verse described as carrying dangerous freedom of thought in the novelty of its versification, the audacity of its sensual fancy, and its habit of mocking major and minor tyrants. The free spirit and the authorities have collided across history. The graffiti artist Banksy, based in England and forever at odds with the authorities, has been called a free spirit for much the same reason.

  The Catholic Church drew its own line where art meets conduct. In 1963 it declared that the arts are not exempt from the absolute primacy of the objective moral order. Art absorbs the news and the politics around it, takes on social dimensions, and becomes a focus of controversy and a force of change, ranging from hate speech at one extreme to artivism at the other, while governments turn art into propaganda for their own ends. The arguments this documentary has traced, over what art is and who gets to say, were never only about beauty. They were always, in the end, about who holds the power to decide, and the cave painters who started it all left no critic behind to tell them they had gotten it wrong.