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What Happened to Art? [Review of 2 Books]
The Invention of Art: A Cultural History
By Larry Shiner (Philosophy Professor). University of Chicago Press
The Invisible Masterpiece
By Hans Belting (Art Historian). Translated by Helen Atkins. University of Chicago Press
"Our notion of art as the self-guided, original expression of an individual genius could only develop later, between 1680 and 1830. ... the combined forces of Enlightenment philosophy, a growing middle class, and new cultural institutions ... transformed the conception of art. ... Only after the political revolutions of the eighteenth century did art develop an autonomous life."
"Kant, Schiller, and other theorists set down new definitions of 'the aesthetic,' prescribing not only the right kind of art but the right way to enjoy it: in quiet contemplation. ... the middle-class public was intensely uneasy in such matters. To the rescue, enter a whole new caste of cultural intermediaries: curators, art dealers, and, for that matter, book critics."
"Craftsmanship, purpose, pleasure giving -- these are the qualities that Shiner claims were lost as art crystallized into an independent realm. ... In Shiner's view, the advance of modernism looks 'less like a great liberation than a fracture we have been trying to heal ever since.'"
" ... Belting begins his story of art at Shiner's 'fracture' point, the late eighteenth century ... [artists begin to] attempt to make art itself visible. ... this attempt ... has been art's mission for 200 years. ... an 'idea of art gained mastery over works themselves' ... Art could never again come to rest in the form of a 'masterpiece,' for to do so would be to abandon its utopian ideals. ... 'This then is the hell of art: one chases a phantom.'"
"Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, where the heroics of history painting tell a new story, of national disgrace; Gauguin's will-to- primitivism in the South Seas; Malevich's Black Square backed up with manifestos; Tinguely's Hommage à New York, a sculpture of scraps set on auto-destruct. Here are all the familiar myths of modernism and several less familiar ones, each chronicled as the effort to mark some progress toward 'an impossible ideal.' ... After the precision of van Eyck and the luster of Titian, what could artistic 'progress' possibly mean? As a disheartened Delacroix complained in his journal in 1847: 'The traditions are exhausted. All the great problems of art were solved back in the sixteenth century.' Hence, we find modern artists not so much trying to build on the achievements of the Old Masters as breaking them down to disclose art's hard quintessence, abandoning one by one every visible means of support: narrative, figuration, feeling, space, and ... even authorship."
"Behind both Shiner's cultural lamentation and Belting's episodic history stands Grandpa Hegel, who foretold art's irrevocable flight from the world of forms into the realm of ideas. Hegel saw the seismic shift from Classical to Romantic art as a change not just of style but of 'element.' Art's very constitution had changed, he wrote, 'from sensuousness to inward reflection. . . . What is apparent to the senses alone sinks into worthlessness.' For Hegel, this move toward abstraction was evident not just in art but in the overall dominance of ideas, which art forms would never again be able to contain." ... [more]
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