Art, Design, Craft, Beauty and All Those Things…

By Donald Richardson

Responding to many recent calls for redress and restitution, Richardson summarises the historical and current situation and attributes its problematics to the fact that theorists and historians have taken the concept art as a generic that includes both design and craft – which are actually and validly distinguishable from art by application of the concept function/al ­– or else ignored the two entirely. Considering the concept function/al, he maintains, calls into question the view that the three may be sub-classes of the one class: whereas in a work of art, typically there is a resolution of the tension between form and content, in works of design and craft the resolution is between form and function. How this recognition can clarify the issue informs the entire book.

The book’s other major thesis is the realisation that aesthetic values are inherently human and that, therefore, they apply not only to art but to life in general. Far from being frivolous or a mere ‘emotion’, the aesthetic is a sense of equivalent psychic status to sight and hearing ­and, like them, is employed at almost every moment of our daily lives – which fact grounds art, design and craft deeply in human life. This is reflected in the universal use of the human form (including the exhibition of sexual characteristics) in art.

The eternal conflict between making art and making a living from making art is examined and contrasted to the rarely-recognised, but positive, role of design in planning and industry.

Richardson also critiques common theories of representation and composition, including ‘creativity’, Albertian perspective and scientific and geometric theories of beauty and composition; also the relevance of the camera and the computer in the field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781528988360

Donald Richardson

Donald Richardson OAM, a senior practicing artist and retired long-term educator in art, design and art history, has never been satisfied by historic writing in the field. In this book, he summarises and deconstructs key documents and marshals the clamouring desperation of many for redress and restitution. In the process, he proposes innovations for education and practice (in particular relating to perspective rendering and form). More generally, he proposes that the aesthetic be recognised as a sense of universal human relevance and value.

Book preview

About the Author

Donald Richardson OAM, a senior practicing artist and retired long-term educator in art, design and art history, has never been satisfied by historic writing in the field. In this book, he summarises and deconstructs key documents and marshals the clamouring desperation of many for redress and restitution. In the process, he proposes innovations for education and practice (in particular relating to perspective rendering and form).

More generally, he proposes that the aesthetic be recognised as a sense of universal human relevance and value.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the artists, designers and craftspeople who have been betrayed by generations of self-serving theorists and historians.

Copyright Information ©

Donald Richardson 2023

The right of Donald Richardson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528988339 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528988346 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781528988353 (Audiobook)

ISBN 9781528988360 (ePub e-book)

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their invaluable support, advice and assistance: first and foremost, wife and fellow artist, Penelope Choate, Dr Margaret Hooper, Paula York, Laurence L Gellon, Ross Hill and Fred Mann.

Foreword

Many have tried to define art but few – if any – have had any success. In the late twentieth century the art world seemed to have generally acquiesced in the position famously taken by the linguistic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, in relation to the definition of the word game – i.e., that in spite of the variety and complexity of the concept, we all understand what we mean by the term (because all games have a family resemblance to each other), so we do not need to define game.¹ There seemed to be some justification in believing that the same principle applied to art but this did not stop the discussion in the art world: the most recent publication What Art Is (2013) by US critic Arthur C Danto is referenced extensively.

This book discusses and analyses the general confusion that has resulted. In an attempt at elucidation it makes three main points:

That the historical practice of using the term art generically to cover not only art per se but also design per se (and usually to ignore craft entirely) is not only invalid but also has been instrumental in creating the confusion;²

That it is invalid – and factually wrong – to assume (as the art world usually has) that matters aesthetic are exclusively and uniquely the province of art (and perhaps, maybe, also of craft and design – particularly architecture³, and

That representation⁴ – the most ancient, enduring and universal aspect of art – is generally undervalued. Far from being mere copying it is no less than epistemology i.e., what it is possible to know about the world and how to validly represent it, the latter depending on the former.

An unlooked-for justification for the present study is the results of a survey of US artists, critics, writers and arts administrators conducted online by the journal ARTnews, 8 and 21 November 2016 under the title ‘What is Wrong With the Art World?’ It yielded about twenty responses which revealed consensus on a number of themes covered in this book – of which writing was in progress – including:

objection to the inordinate power of ‘a small group of influential people leading the major museums, galleries, auction houses and art publications…’;

the difficulty artists face earning a reasonable living from their work (see The Realpolitik of Art, Design and Craft, Ch 6);

that the art world is not identical with the art market;

that art must be recognised as more than mere entertainment (see Art as Entertainment? Ch 3; Representation as Epistemology, Ch 4;

the need for art education at the primary and secondary level; ( see Aesthetic Education, Ch 4);

the need for creativity to be valued by the highest levels of administration (see Chapter 5);

that Postmodernism was a negative influence, and, consequently, the need to establish a ‘truly critical critical (sic) apparatus’.⁵

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first publication, The Art Newspaper (October 2015) printed the replies of various international art world authorities to its questionnaire ‘What is art for?’ yielding very little, apart from a general pessimism. ARTnews followed on 3 January 2017 by posting online ‘A Timeline of Attempts to Fix the Art World’ with no suggestions for positive action.

It is surely significant that these well-respected contemporary journals should have raised the issue within months of each other.

To this we can add the fact that in recent decades the governments of most Anglophone nations have refused to recognise that, at least since Ancient Egypt, political and religious elites have always regarded it as their responsibility and privilege to fund the arts if only to celebrate and commemorate their own status. That this responsibility was progressively assumed by economic elites from the eighteenth century has permitted governments in the USA and the UK to reduce or discontinue funding the arts and arts education with the result that ‘[by] default, today’s dominant narratives are being written by dealers and auctioneers’ rather than informed scholars and critics.⁶ One doyen of the art world – Will Gompertz, the BBC’s arts editor (2016, p.186), admits: ‘…arts folk talk bollocks…’ (Also see Millionaire Authorities Ch 3)

Add to this the various movements internationally in the current century to recognise the work of other than Western male artists – ‘outsider art’, that of coloured people and women equally to that of men.⁷ In 2019 an exhibition in the Wallach Art Gallery in New York and the Musée d’Orsay ­Black Models: from Géricault to Matisse – addressed the issue of anonymous women of colour as subsidiary figures in compositions, of which the most famous is Manet’s Olympia (1865, Musée d’Orsay), naming them instead for the coloured women illustrated.⁸

To conclude, a film without either a definite beginning or end, the 2017 Cannes Palme d’Or-winning film The Square, written and directed by Ruben Östlund, the subject of which was an art installation of the same name, is a perfect metaphor for a culture that has lost the ability to distinguish between art and life. In Variety, 19 May 2017 Owen Gleiberman dubs The Square ‘a suavely merciless take-down of the decadence of the contemporary art world’. And A.O. Scott, in The New York Times, 26 October 2017, asks, slyly: ‘Is there a saying about fish that live in glass barrels shooting themselves in the foot?’

Östlund justifies the cynicism of his film in artnet News on 9 November 2017 as: ‘The art world is…like a satire from the beginning’.

---

In Philosophical Investigations (1953. English translations Prentice Hall 1999 and Blackwell 2001). For the extent to which artists may have understood Wittgenstein’s arguments see Elizabeth Legge, ‘Taking it as Red. Michael Snow and Wittgenstein’, Journal of Canadian Art History, 18, 2, 1997, pp. 68-91. For a cogent defence of the Wittgenstein principle, see ‘Relational Theories of Art: the History of an Error’ by Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley in the British Journal of Aesthetics, 52, 2, April 2012. Storr (1976, pp.147-162) analyses the connection between creativity, play and art.↩︎

The distinction between the functional and the non-functional – to the extent that it has been made – seems only to have been made in the West.↩︎

For an extended review of this position see Bourassa (1991).↩︎

This term is used here to mean the depiction in a drawing, painting, sculpture or photograph of something in the real world. It is not identical with art itself.↩︎

See also Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?’, Critical Inquiry, 30, 2 (Winter 2004) pp.225-248.↩︎

Jane Kallir in The Art Newspaper, September 2018, p.53; Richard Noble in The Art Newspaper, October 2018, p.5.↩︎

See Sarah Cascone, artnet News, 2 November 2018; Kate Brown, artnet News, 30 October 2018.↩︎

Note that the title Olympia itself was not changed.↩︎

Chapter 1

Concepts and Nomenclature

‘In the beginning was the Word…’

While not wishing to engage Saint John in a discussion about the meaning and intention of these opening words of his Gospel we have no alternative but to acknowledge that language is absolutely central to our humanity. It is a truism that we give names to concepts as well as to things, but what we often fail to recognise is that the identifying characteristics of a concept may change over time, perhaps imperceptibly. When this happens we rarely modify or qualify the term thereby causing mystification and arguing at cross purposes. Common examples are the terms man and woman. Prior to the advent of a general consciousness of feminist principles in the western world, these terms meant – in respect of man – chauvinist, strong, dominant, aggressive/defensive and disrespectful or contemptuous of the feminine and – in respect of woman – demure, deferential and passive. The term man was also used in lieu of person/human. In the twenty-first century some of these characterisations are challenged but the same terms are still used without qualification or modification, apart from a brief identification of ‘the new-age guy’ in the 1970s and more recently the concept LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and/or intersex).

This issue of changing characteristics is particularly relevant to what in western culture is generally termed art. Just what actually constitutes the concept is a major issue that has plagued art theory, art criticism, art education and art writing for many generations. We all believe that we know what art is but when views are compared there are many discrepancies – even among authorities (see Some historic definitions of art, below). In colloquial speech we use the term indiscriminately in expressions like the state of the art (of anything: football, computers, fashion), artful and the art of war. It is commonly used as an honorific – one of those words which imply or confer honour in and by their use. Anything that is significantly above the ordinary is ‘art’: skilful skateboarding, the most deceptive ‘sting’, an exemplary fruitcake. Clearly colloquial usage is no help in understanding what the concept art genuinely is but it stems from the high social status that began to be awarded to art from the Italian Renaissance period and aided and abetted by the anglophone art world’s general lack of rigour in relation to its use of terminology in its field.

Some historic definitions of art¹

These statements indicate the extent of the problem:

‘Art…skill, especially human skill…’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1950)

‘Then shall we set down the artists…as mimics of a copy of…virtue, or of whatever else they represent, who never get in touch with the truth?’ (Plato, 4th century BC)

‘Only the poet…doth grow in effect another Nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or…such as never were in Nature.’ (Sir Philip Sidney, 1595)

‘Poetry…takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ (William Wordsworth, 1815)

‘A work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.’ (Émile Zola, late nineteenth century)

‘The artist is the creator of beautiful things.’ (Oscar Wilde, 1891)

‘People will come to understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty.’ (Leo Tolstoy, 1896)

art is vision or intuition…’ (Benedetto Croce, 1913)

‘The artist’s work is the ordering of what in most minds is disordered.’ (I A Richards, 1924)

‘Art is the expression of the highest level of a cultural epoch.’ (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1938)

‘A man-made object demanding to be experienced aesthetically.’ (Irwin Panofsky, 1955)

‘A work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and what it expresses is human feeling.’ (Suzanne Langer, 1957)

‘If it sells, it’s art.’ (an anonymous director of Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, 1950s)

‘Art is anything you can get away with.’ (Marshall McLuhan, 1967)

‘Art is something we do intentionally…things humans make or do.’ (Richard Wollheim, 1972)

‘Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.’ (Andy Warhol, 1975)

‘What turns something from a piece of nature into a work of art is magic.’ (David Hockney, 1980)

What can we make of this? There is some agreement between some of these statements but also some very significant differences. The most glaring discrepancy is that between Tolstoy and Wilde – near contemporaries and both acknowledged to be great artists – who could hardly have been in greater disagreement about the role of beauty in art. Certainly Shakespeare, Beethoven and Michelangelo were skilled operators in their respective fields but there is much more than skill involved in one of the former’s sonnets, the Seventh Symphony and one of the Slave sculptures of the latter. Skill of itself cannot define art because it is equally involved in many other human activities and accomplishments. This point was made as long ago as 1550 by Italian art historian Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. So, too, the aesthetic and imagination. How can the artist ‘copy’ nature and at the same time ‘improve’ on it or ‘order’ it? Indeed artists are humans who express feelings and temperament – ‘recalling emotion in tranquillity’ perhaps – but again this is not exclusive to art..² On the other hand Croce’s ‘intuition’ and Hockney’s ‘magic’ are too arcane for the real world. Renowned art theorists Erwin Panofsky, Richard Wollheim and Bendetto Croce agree that only humans make art -but humans make a lot of other things too.

The last two quotations – by McLuhan and the anonymous Marlborough Galleries’ director – are cynical reflections on the art market rather than on the concept art itself. Similarly Warhol’s statement. Although they are all amusing as well as true in some sense none of them is any help in understanding what art truly is. Worse, the cavalier conflation of taxonomy with value judgment – the result of the dearth of intelligent guidance – is not only illogical, it dishonours art, craft and design and has created the default position in the popular mind and that of many curators and competition judges alike in accepting that ‘anything can be art’ or ‘it is all art anyway’³ This is a popular misunderstanding of the implications of Marcel Duchamp’s famous ‘ready-mades’ and based in the unfortunate historic usage of art as a generic.⁴

And there is a logical disjunction in this position: if everything is ‘art’, then nothing can be art per se (or art is nothing); secondly, it uses art insouciantly as an honorific in that it implies that all art is good art, whereas there is much art that is not of the top quality. It has also allowed the debasement of the concept art at the hands of no doubt well-meaning but misguided wealthy amateurs who, in the twenty-first century, established major collections which they displayed in prominent museums, thus setting themselves up in the hiatus as authorities (see pp.49ff; also p.20).

The McLuhan statement is, of course, germane to the topic of this book: it was the ultimate commentary on the condition of the art world in the later twentieth century and remains so today – to the total disgrace of the theorists of art, if not the art world as a whole. This casual attitude to what is one of the most ubiquitous and valuable of all human activities is the reason that, in our culture, artists and designers get only grudging recognition. The most obvious instance of this is that often in the popular press sportspeople and criminals are not only named but their photographs printed whereas the creators of monuments are not even identified.

Many in the Anglo world have a cargo-cult⁵ attitude to creative work: we think it descends from the skies, originating we know not nor care not where, nor by whom it was made. A paradigm example of this attitude is witnessed in a 1920s Australian newspaper’s announcement of the commissioning of a memorial to the late King Edward VII for Adelaide, the capital of South Australia.⁶ It would be done by ‘one of the best men in the [British] Empire’ but he was not named. The sculptor was none other than Bertram Mackennal (1863–1931), the only Australian ever to be admitted to membership of London’s Royal Academy of Arts (RA) and the country’s first artist knight.

In this context it is important to note that all of the writers quoted use the term art as a generic⁷ – neither defined nor specified – confident in the assumption that all their readers would agree as to the term’s meaning. As the disagreement between Wilde and Tolstoy shows, this was not a confident assumption at the time and it is certainly not the case in the twenty-first century. Using the term art generically to cover painting and sculpture and perhaps also architecture, but no other branch of design, and certainly not the crafts, is not only myopic but also severely misleading (see Three Eternal, Universal and Linked… Aspects, Ch 3). It is equivalent to using animal as a generic but failing to acknowledge cats and dogs as very different sub-classes.

To complicate matters further in the last half-century a number of derivative uses have crept into the language. Work of art, the self-defining term used for many years to designate pictures and sculptures, has been challenged by artwork. Due to lack of intellectual rigour rather than for any positive or considered reason, this term has served as a shorthand analogue of work of art. Artwork has long been used in the graphic art industry with a clear understanding of its meaning specifically to denote the illustrative material in a poster or advertisement as distinct from the written copy – an aspect of design rather than art. Nevertheless the term seems bound to displace work of art thereby depriving the language of some of its specificity and richness. There is also the tendency to consider artefact a synonym of art but one needs only consult a dictionary to find that this term has an agreed usage in anthropology and archaeology to describe any object made by a human, humanoid or animal.

Accordingly it can fairly be said – pace Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw or Winston Churchill⁸ – that the art world in the twenty-first century is a community of great individuals divided by a common language – a verbal language of intelligent discussion.⁹ That there is not even a generally-agreed terminology is a matter of extreme embarrassment and inconvenience for those who wish to write intelligently about/discuss the field. The frustration of academics is expressed succinctly by Carolyn Dean, Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture in the University of California, Santa Cruz, in ‘The Trouble with (the Term) Art’ in Art Journal (Summer 2006, 65, 2, pp.24–32). After an extended review of the problem (‘…art is an ambiguous term with multifarious and inconsistent meanings…the elephant in our disciplinary living room’) Dean concludes, scholastically and nihilistically: ‘maybe we ought to discard it as an intellectually unproductive if not actually counterproductive term…’ (op.cit., pp.25–26). An attempt by trans-Atlantic art historians in the post-Postmodernist last decades of the twentieth century to rationalise the issue as ‘The New Art History’ yields nothing of value mainly because the participants were principally concerned with content (feminist, Marxist, sexual identity or semiotic) and ignored form, and being academic art historians were unable or unwilling to distinguish between art and design, also between art and the art market.¹⁰

In general the art world itself doesn’t seem to care. Obviously it has become so inured to the disjunctions that it accepts them and carries on as if they do not exist: a betrayal of its intellectual duty as well as an impediment to rational discussion.¹¹ A significant recent instance of this is the attitude of the Australian National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).¹² In 2012, in response to the defunding of Craft Australia by the national government, NAVA sponsored the National Craft Initiative study resulting in the publication in 2016 of the Agenda for Australian Craft and Design. Therein one searches in vain for any explication of the usage of these two key terms or any relationship with art per se. Also in that year NAVA advertised its Australian Artists’ Grant Scheme ‘to assist professional visual and media arts, craft and design practitioners’ but sought curricula vitae from ‘artists’ alone. When this was queried, the response was: ‘…all of whom we consider to be artists…[although it notes]…we also have programs that specifically focus on craft and design as these areas are often overlooked…’¹³

A more rational and considered analysis of the current situation was also published in Australia: What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art? (2004), written by writer and gallery director Peter Timms, highlights the dominance of art by the art market. A similar comment is voiced by Anna Somers Cocks, founder and editor of The Art Newspaper, in her publication’s 300th issue – in particular the art world’s ‘ap[ing] the world of business’ and accepting funding and advice ‘from questionable sources’ (April 2018 issue, p.5).

The most unfortunate betrayal of the subject occurred in the years following the publication in 1950 of Ernst Gombrich’s influential art-history book The Story of Art. Gombrich writes: ‘There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists’.¹⁴ The betrayal was not Gombrich’s so much as that of the art world, which failed to read on a few more lines to his qualification: ‘Art with a capital A has come to be something of a bogey and a fetish…[thereby implying]…it has no existence…’ Those sentences have been quoted ever since by friend and foe of art alike as authoritative proof that there is or can be no such thing as art – with or without capitalisation. One problem is that Gombrich does not explain exactly how capital-A art differs from art without the capital because like most theorists he uses the term in its generic sense to include the concept design as well as the beautiful without explication. Nor does he say what artists produce if it is not art.¹⁵

None of these disjunctions has ever been resolved. Hopes of a resolution were raised in 2013 when it was announced that the last book of well-credentialed US art writer Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013) – What Art Is – had been published by the equally well-credentialed Yale University Press. Disappointingly the title made a false claim. World reaction to the publication is encapsulated by a post on the Amazon website for the book: ‘I was looking for guidance, but none there’.¹⁶

The problem was flagged well before the Second World War by English poet and philosopher Herbert Read (1893–1968) in The Meaning of Art (1931)¹⁷: ‘Most of our misconceptions of art arise from lack of consistency in the use of the words ’art’ and ‘beauty’ ‘(op.cit., unpaginated, paragraph 4). Read’s book raises the issue but neither he nor the general art world took it up with any consistency; in fact discussion of terminology is often dismissed by both practitioners and theorists as ’mere nomenclature’.¹⁸ It is indeed a matter of nomenclature rather than linguistic science because there is nothing rational about the process.

The matter is referred to but no solution suggested in 1958 by much-quoted aesthetic philosopher Munro C Beardsley’s (1915–85) Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. He is forced (op.cit., pp.88–89) to coin the curious term visual design ¹⁹ because ‘there is no single term…to refer to all such things as paintings, drawings, etchings, engravings, lithographs, photographs and finger-paintings – but excluding sculpture and architecture’. Beardsley does not explain his exclusions from the neologism, but he does specifically include (without explication, but a degree of levity) ‘frost on a window pane…[and] the zebra’s stripes’ – natural things. He analyses the principles of ‘visual design’ in following pages but only mentions function in relation to design in the latter portion of the book (pp.305ff) but with little appreciation of the principles to be discussed below.

The problem was still very evident in 1990. Robert Hughes’ (1938–2012) introduction to his Nothing If Not Critical takes the art world to task for its dearth of analytical rigour and for regarding art as ‘all style and no substance’ and the history of art as ‘a mere box of samples’ (op.cit, pp.15ff). This situation was evidenced in the 1990–1 exhibition in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, ‘High and Low’, and confirmed by the owner of Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA): ‘Anything is possible in the fashion-driven world of contemporary art’ (Franklin 2014, p.10).

By the early twenty-first century, an air of desperation pervaded the trans-Atlantic art world. This was exemplified in England by the Arts Council initiating the 2007–8 ‘Arts Debate’, a national inquiry which sought to establish the relevance of the arts to contemporary British culture. It is noteworthy that three of its four aims related to funding for the arts in general. The visual arts, including design and craft, received no particular attention. Its findings were predictably anodyne: hundreds of people valued the arts; no one hated them; there was a big demand for ‘quality’; and most thought that non-experts should have a bigger say than politicians in how they were funded. Apparently most participants were unaware that at least since the building of the pyramids in ancient Egypt governments (local, national and ecclesiastical) have always funded the arts.

Ten years later the iconic Courtauld Institute of Art launched a ‘friends’ programme – promoted as ‘Join the art movement’ – to coincide with the renovation of its home, Somerset House in London. Included was a ‘Study Skills. Getting Ready for University’ booklet. Nowhere in the online presence of the institute, or in the booklet, is the term art defined or the concept art distinguished from design and craft.²⁰ Also at that time, the UK authorities decided to cease examining Art History at A level (promulgated on AQA Art and Design website).

The dilemma haunted Robert Storr, Dean of Yale University’s School of Art. In his 2013 Convocation Lecture to New York’s College Art Association he laments that ‘There’s not been much in the way of an autocritique [’in our sector of the Culture Industry’ (sic)]…so much of what we do…is not art history at all; it’s ideological historicism…evidently ‘theorising’ means never having to say you’re sorry’. He stresses the need ‘to intellectually restore the currency we use’ while accepting that ‘we have made this art world and…it does not work’.

Finally in 2018 New York’s Guggenheim Museum of Art sponsored a symposium, ‘Culture and Its Discontents: A Public Conversation’, characterised by critic Rahel Aima in Art in America online on 17 April 2018 as: ‘a feel-good liberalpalooza [and] wilful avoidance of real issues’ although ‘a few legitimate criticisms of the art world were made in passing’.

The problem is not about words as such but the rationalisation of concepts, devising terms for them and using these terms consistently – the subject of this book.²¹ The major solution proposed is to distinguish clearly the concept art from the inconsistent application of the term art in art writing.

Nomenclature Manqué

Given the universal confusion about the concept art and/or the term art, it is surprising that few of the authors of art-history texts have defined their subject. One searches in vain for a definition of the concept/term even in iconic volumes like the Penguin A Dictionary of Art and Artists (1959 edition); The Oxford Companion to Art (1979 edition) and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art (1981 edition). Admittedly these editions are dated but they do represent the state of the field at a crucial time -the late twentieth century.²²

Clearly the art world’s ability to live with these disjunctions has contributed significantly to the confusion for generations of general readers and viewers. A poignant example of this is the strenuous efforts Australian anthropologist Howard Morphy²³ makes in his 2007 Becoming Art (an examination of the visual expression of the Yolngu people of the Northern Territory) to understand the Western concept art and relate it to the Indigenous. He was forced to conclude (op.cit., p.17): ‘There appears to be no a priori reason why a particular conception of what art is should become the de facto category to which all other arts are compared…’²⁴ Another is the difficulty the legal officials of the Australian Attorney-General’s Department had when, in 1968 and again in 2000, they drafted copyright (artists’ moral rights) legislation for the country. Laws require clear definition of terms but these officials were unable to depend upon current local or international art theory for this, so they avoid the terms art and artist altogether; instead the legislation refers to ‘artistic work’ and ‘authorship of artistic work’, both of which terms are defined in the Act without evident difficulty.

Generally art schools²⁵ in which the artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were trained did not participate in this discussion – such as it was – because their alumni having been trained in a modified atelier system, studying under master artists, were mostly neither great readers nor philosophers and therefore generally ignored the theories. This resulted in a philosophical and critical hiatus in these institutions and consequently an unexamined acceptance of populist dogmas like the ‘deconstruction’ and ‘appropriation’ of Postmodernism and the mistaken belief that Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre had proven that ‘anything can be art’.

These factors, combined with the increasing use of photography as a medium of representation as well as a superficial reading of the theory of art education expounded by Viennese-born US educator, Viktor Lowenfeld (1903–60), in his iconic Creative and Mental Growth (1947), enabled lecturers and instructors to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the learning of their students. Lowenfeld advocated allowing children’s efforts at art to develop naturally without inculcation but it was never intended for tertiary education.²⁶ As a result from the mid-twentieth century tertiary-level art students virtually taught themselves or remained in a state of naïvety whereby a great deal of expertise was lost. In the post-Second World War period, art schools progressively decided to dispense with teaching methods of representation and composition, regarding them as outmoded. As a result they dumped thousands of dollars’ worth of plaster casts from antique sculpture that had been used to teach generations of students the skills of representation and a sense of proportion. This was despite the fact that most of the revolutionaries of Modernism had had classical training in composition and representation so that when they either ‘broke the rules’ or modified them, they did so with respect for and understanding of the principles thereby validly creating a new aesthetic. The resulting contemporary situation is – as described by Christopher Allen, the well-informed and thoughtful art critic of The Australian newspaper (18–19 June 2016) – that art schools that ‘are full of people whose training was inconsistent’ where it is unlikely ‘to find much useful guidance in the techniques of painting or drawing…[and where] the practice of the fundamental skills…has become something of a counter-culture’. In a reaction to this parlous situation, the New York School of Visual Arts (SVA NYC) introduced a masters course in Art Writing, ‘the practice of criticism writ large, aspiring to literature…to ask fundamental questions about art and life…[with]…special emphasis on the history and current transformations of the image’ (from its website in 2018).

Art is Human

It takes but little reflection to realise that only humans make art.²⁷ In spite of claims to the contrary, machines like the computer and the camera can only make art if they are wielded by an artist, just as with the traditional brushes and chisels.

Even though birds sing and build ingenious nests, spiders weave wondrous webs and some animals and birds fashion tools, it is erroneous to designate these things music, architecture, textiles, art or engineering because these creatures have no option but to make or do these things. On the other hand, when humans make things they do so voluntarily: there is nothing in the world that has been fabricated voluntarily that was not first conceived by a human and created by human skill, judgment and ingenuity.²⁸ A primordial human or humanoid made the first knife, clothing, wheel, pottery, plough, picture and building²⁹ and their descendants have, in principle, cloned these things ever since. These objects were first conceived by what we now know – retrospectively – as (and to use contemporary English terms) a designer or artist and fabricated by a craftsperson or artisan – the latter often the artist or designer themselves.³⁰

Although he seems to be unaware of these distinctions, Dennis Dutton (1944–2010) in his The Art Instinct (2009) argues that art is inherent to humanity due to its having been developed and transmitted over the generations by factors similar to those Darwin described in his theory of evolution; that is, that art is generated by an ‘instinct’ that has contributed to – and continues to contribute to – our survival as a species. And, while, in the first chapter of his Vision and Design, Roger Fry (1866–1934) questions an easy assumption of ‘direct and decisive connection’ between art and life (as he terms it on p.6), the connection is certainly assumed in his second chapter, ‘An Essay on Aesthetics’.

Some claim that the science of artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to develop and that, at some time in the future, AI technology will be able to produce works of art, but this remains to be seen.³¹ At the present time, art is inherently and exclusively an activity of human creativeness – a subject further developed in Chapter 5.

The incredible complexity of the twin, interacting foundations of art, representation and composition, is examined in Chapters 8 and 9 and Appendix II (a practitioner’s critique of selected theoretical writings).

Art and Design

The art world has usually ignored the vast difference in principle as well as form between (for example Monet’s 1872 painting Sunrise, an Impression and the Parthenon; or Matisse’s 1911 picture The Red Studio and a coffee-cup). While all these objects have in common the fact that they were created by human beings, the difference is that the coffee-cup and the temple are utilitarian objects whereas the paintings are not. While western culture these days gives licence to painters and sculptors to create virtually anything as art for art’s sake (the runaway of the concept ‘art for art’s sake’), useful things have to be functional; i.e., they are actually more or less useless if they are not materially and positively instrumental to human life and well-being³² (see The Functional Imperative – Ch 7). Application of the principle of functionality enables us to distinguish validly craft and design on the one hand from art on the other.³³ This, of course, neither means nor implies that aesthetic principles and values do not apply to design and craft as they do to art – and to life in general. And that works of art are not functional does not mean that they are useless: their value is richly attested by attendances at art galleries and sales of works and art books. Nor does it mean that art has no ‘function’: art contributes positively to our humanity in a non-functional way; on the other hand, we live within a world of (functional) craft and design.³⁴ In fact, the significance of the hitherto rarely recognised difference in principle between the functional and the non-functional is such that it may not even be reasonable to regard them as sub-classes of the one class.

The fact that artists, craftspeople and designers use similar materials, concepts and creativity effectively cloaks these distinctions but it is imperative that we acknowledge that, whereas artists are free to conceive and make anything they wish, designers are constrained by the fact that they are required to create things that have a defined function – usually expressed as a design brief. On the other hand, there can be no such thing as an art brief.³⁵

Finally, to accept that ‘it’s all art’ necessitates the acceptance, for example, that the atomic bomb is art. However all bombs are works of design – eminently functional for their designated purpose – leaving aside the ethics of dropping ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, for example.

A paradigm instance of what can happen when the principled difference between art and design is not recognised may be seen in the tragic case of Tilted Arc, by US sculptor Richard Serra (b.1938). This impressive 73-ton, 120-foot-long, steel abstract sculpture was placed in a plaza between office buildings in New York City in 1981 in such a way as to destroy the functionality of the space between the buildings as a plaza. Acknowledged by many as a fine work of art this sculpture was rendered unsatisfactory as a functional object by its insensitive placement. As a result, after eight years of argument and acrimony, it was ignominiously destroyed. All the pompous discussions about the moral rights of the artist and the proprietary rights of the sculpture’s owner missed the point that even a great work of art is never a work of design.³⁶

Another pertinent example is the Sydney Opera House, designed in 1957 by Danish architect Jørn Utzon (1918–2008). A popularly-admired structure, crowned romantically with (non-functional) sculptural forms that evoke yachts sailing adjacent to its site – the magnificent Sydney Harbour – and in 2007 included on the UNESCO World Heritage List, it has never been used to stage a major opera because of deficiencies in its internal capacity and facilities.³⁷ Universally praised as a work of art, it is strictly speaking a failure as a work of design.

A notable instance on the theoretical side is the position taken by US critic Arthur C Danto in relation to Andy Warhol’s controversial work Brillo Box (1964). In his various publications (particularly 1994, p. 384ff), Danto asserts that this object is ‘art’, whereas the actual cartons in which the scouring-pads were shipped are not, even though the two are perceptually indistinguishable. Danto’s inability to recognise the difference between a work of art and a work of design causes him to designate ‘the mere Brillo boxes’ ‘commercial art’. For further discussion of this see Appendix II.³⁸

The issue is more complex than this, exemplified by Michelangelo’s fresco on the vault of the Sistine Chapel (1508–12). Like most murals in churches it was created at the direction of a relevant authority – in this case the Pope – the design brief³⁹ stating that the series of pictures should illustrate passages from the Old Testament – their functional purpose. Thus while each of the pictures is an individual work of