Reconsidering the idea of high art

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 11, 2002 | by Michael J. Lewis

In fashionable academic circles, the idea that a work of art is an exquisite manifestation of human genius expressed in terms of form, mass and color, now is widely discredited or ridiculed. Some might feel this loss to be a cultural tragedy, but not Larry Shiner, professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois. In his ambitious study, The Invention of Art: A Culture History (Univ. of Chicago, $35 342 pp), Shiner takes great pains to show that our idea of high art is no universal constant but a peculiar product of 18th-century efforts to formalize the division between the fine and the mechanical arts.

Medieval society knew no such division, nor did classical antiquity. Not until the French established academies of art and architecture in the mid-17th century was there any official apparatus that elevated the fine arts above mere artisanry. And not until 1771 was a museum built for the exclusive display of fine art.

According to Shiner, the experience of viewing art changed dramatically during the course of the 18th century. Art once was meant to be appreciated didactically, or narratively, or as a performance of good taste. After the triumph of romanticism, however, a work of art was enjoyed in purely aesthetic terms, viewed in a state of rapt attention or disinterested contemplation. This disinterestedness -- a benign indifference to the "moral, practical or recreational" function of the work of art -- was crucial to the idea of high art.

Shiner isn't alarmed by recent developments with respect to art, which he sees only as "the end of a particular social institution constructed in the course of the eighteenth century." One hopes his judgment is premature. He fails to note, for example, the establishment in 1982 of the New Criterion, a journal with the explicit goal of championing formal values in art, literature, and music -- even if these values are rooted in the 18th century.

MICHAEL J. LEWIS TEACHES AMERICAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE.