'A lucid book . . . it should be a must-read for anyone active in the arts.'-Marc Spiegler, Chicago Tribune Books
With The Invention of Art, Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of fine art is a modern invention—that the lines drawn between art and craft resulted from key social transformations in Europe during the long eighteenth century.
The author, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, is also a lover of the arts, which should be kept in mind while reading this ten-years-long labor, for it seems to involve a sort of dethroning of the status of the artist as an artificial construction of a few centuries ago. Shiner is clear that he has no agenda other than to understand how our modern perception of art differs so markedly from that taken for granted by vastly diverse cultures since the dawn of recorded history, from cave paintings up through the Renaissance. Art (and especially 'fine art') until very recently had no autonomous standing: 'Most of the things we classify as Greek or Roman fine art were thoroughly embedded in social, political, religious, and practical contexts . . . most of what we contemplate in our museums today were things of everyday or cult use: storage jars, drinking cups, votive statuary, funerary markers, parts of temples, fragments of house decoration . . .' There was relatively little of our current distinction between 'art' and 'craft,' and in fact the original meaning of the word 'art' itself (the Greek techne, the Latin ars) 'embraced things as diverse as carpentry and poetry, shoemaking and medicine, sculpture and horse breaking.' Briefly surveying the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Shiner locates the rise of the concept of the artist as solitary genius, of whole categories such as originality, inspiration, imagination, creation, and 'the aesthetic' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and uses the bulk of his study to determine how this occurred and continues to shape our sense of art and the artist. A quietly revolutionary study. 362 pp.
The author, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, is also a lover of the arts, which should be kept in mind while reading this ten-years-long labor, for it seems to involve a sort of dethroning of the status of the artist as an artificial construction of a few centuries ago. Shiner is clear that he has no agenda other than to understand how our modern perception of art differs so markedly from that taken for granted by vastly diverse cultures since the dawn of recorded history, from cave paintings up through the Renaissance. Art (and especially 'fine art') until very recently had no autonomous standing: 'Most of the things we classify as Greek or Roman fine art were thoroughly embedded in social, political, religious, and practical contexts . . . most of what we contemplate in our museums today were things of everyday or cult use: storage jars, drinking cups, votive statuary, funerary markers, parts of temples, fragments of house decoration . . .' There was relatively little of our current distinction between 'art' and 'craft,' and in fact the original meaning of the word 'art' itself (the Greek techne, the Latin ars) 'embraced things as diverse as carpentry and poetry, shoemaking and medicine, sculpture and horse breaking.' Briefly surveying the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Shiner locates the rise of the concept of the artist as solitary genius, of whole categories such as originality, inspiration, imagination, creation, and 'the aesthetic' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and uses the bulk of his study to determine how this occurred and continues to shape our sense of art and the artist. A quietly revolutionary study. 362 pp.
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