Beth E Peterson
c/o Cattails Publishing LLC
484 Williamsport Pike #261
Martinsburg, WV 25404
USA
240-527-0900
Text and Artwork:
Copyright © 2008 Beth E Peterson.
All rights reserved.
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What is Art?
This has been a question that has hounded those who work in the arts for decades and even a century or two.
Interestingly enough, however, it is not historically speaking a very old question at all.
For centuries, indeed if not millennium, art as we might define it today did not exist. Artisans
of all sorts...painters, sculptures, woodworkers, metalsmiths, musicians, and (usually) wordsmiths of both poetry and prose...worked to
the demands of the marketplace or to the order of a patron. That patron might be a wealthy individual or a group such as a government, religious
order or secular organization. As such, art as a form of self-expression did not truly exist. The question, in fact, would never have occcurred to
those living long ago.
So when did the question begin? Whence came the ambiguity which shrouds the essence of what art is?
The answer is, the ambiguity of what art is began when those creating visual (and other) creative works
began to question whether what they produced was any different than what other common laborers
produced. This process of questioning the accepted order of things for the visual arts begins to be clearly seen and defined
by painters during the Italian Renaissance. Da Vinci was especially dissatisfied with being viewed as nothing more than a common laborer;
which, given his breadth of abilities, his keen and creative intelligence and his arrogance, is not surprising.
The poets and literary writers had already moved out of the depths of the common laborer (mainly because
they were patently literate, something which had otherwise been reserved for the highest social classes during
the Middle Ages). Da Vinci, and several others, began pushing to be accepted as "intellectuals" as well.
They pointed to and highly stressed the mathematical actions present in accurately representing perspective as a
part of their campaign. This was due to the high esteem which all mathematics, and mathematicians, were held.
Since math was an discipline which the ancient Greeks had indulged in, it was seen as being of much greater
intellectual worthiness.
The push of the Renaissance artists never did lift the visual arts firmly into being an accepted intellectual pursuit, however.
Almost certainly, this was due to the...well...rather messy way in which painters had to work...grinding their own materials,
mixing paints...cleaning up spills and mistakes...all of these were, *ahem*, ungentlemanly.
In addition, the visual arts don't speak simply to the intellect. Visual art hits much more a person than just
their thoughts...It impacts their sensuality (as in 'use of senses'), their emotions, their imaginations, etc.
And so, visual artists were stuck in a quasi state for centuries, being considered semi-intellectual but also smacking of
manual labor. And again, there are the ambiguities...For many artists were, and had to be, quite literate in the
traditions of the intellectual community. They had to know the classical as well as the religious literature, since those
were themes which were often assigned as commissioned. And yet, there were also those who demanded that a piece which they commissioned
be nothing more than an extensive decoration.
What was art? At that time, it was whatever the patron deemed it to be...what they were willing to
pay for, as art. At present, we have moved away from the economic bondage of formal and/or medieval-style patronage.
In a world that mass produces decoration, we are free to move away from the mundane. We are free to redefine and
re-focus our directions. We, now, can determine what is art and what its purpose is to be.
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