30.1. Origin of Concept of Art

The history of the concept “art” cannot be separated from the history of art itself. It is often told as a chronology of masterpieces created in each civilization in the world. It can thus be framed as a story of high culture, epitomized by the Seven Wonders of the World, which is somehow different from vernacular expressions. The latter can, however, be integrated into art historical narratives, in which case they are usually referred to as folk arts or craft. The more closely that an art historian engages with these latter forms of low culture, the more likely it is that they will identify their work as examining visual culture or material culture, or as contributing to fields related to art history, such as anthropology or archeology. In the latter cases art objects may be referred to as archeological artifacts.

The oldest surviving art forms include small sculptures and paintings on rocks and in caves. There are very few known examples of art that date earlier than 40,000 years ago, the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic period. People often rubbed smaller rocks against larger rocks and boulders to paint pictures of their everyday life, such as hunting wild game. A mammoth sculpture found in a German cave was dated to approximately 35,000 years ago.

Prehistoric art objects are rare, and the context of such early art is difficult to determine. Prehistoric, by definition, refers to those cultures which have left no written records of their society. The art historian judges early pieces of art as objects in their own right, with few opportunities for comparison between contemporaneous pieces. Interpretation of such early art must be done primarily in the context of aesthetics tempered by what is known of various hunter-gatherer societies still in existence.

The history of Western art begins with prehistoric art such as Stonehenge. The history continues in Mesopotamia region, and then progresses to the art of Ancient Egypt, which then transitions to Classical antiquity. Classical art includes both Greek and Roman work. Ancient Greek art saw the veneration of the animal form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions.

Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (i.e. Zeus' thunderbolt). Ancient Greek art includes much pottery, sculpture as well as architecture. Greek sculpture is known for the “contrapposto” standing of the figures. The term contrapposto is used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs. The art of Ancient Greece is usually divided stylistically into three periods: the Archaic, the Classical and the Hellenistic. The most prestigious form of Ancient Greek painting was panel painting, now known only from literary descriptions. The ancient Greek concept of art (from Greek “téchne” meaning the root of "technique" and "technology"), with the exception of poetry, involved not freedom of action but subjection to rules. In Rome, this Greek concept was partly shaken, and visual artists were viewed as sharing, with poets, imagination and inspiration.

With the decline of the Roman Empire, the history shifts to medieval art which lasted for a millennium. The high intellectual culture of the medieval period was Islamic, but the era also included Early Christian art, Byzantine art, Gothic art, Anglo-Saxon art, and Viking art. In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths. The Medieval era ended with the Renaissance, followed by the Baroque and Rococo. Sometimes another period, Mannerism, is inserted between Renaissance and Baroque, which is a visual hybrid. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries included Neoclassicism, Romantic art, Academic art, and Realism in art. Art historians disagree when Modern art began, but it was either in the mid-XVIII century with the artist Francisco Goya, the mid-XIX century with the industrial revolution or the late nineteenth century with the advent of Impressionism. The art movements of the late nineteenth through the early twenty first centuries are too numerous to detail here, but can be broadly divided into two categories: Modernism and Contemporary art. The latter is sometimes referred to with another term, which has a subtly different connotation, Postmodern art.

Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local color (meaning the plain color of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that color brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local color is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.

Let us give two examples of historically influential definitions of art offered by great philosophers. First, Plato holds in the Republic and elsewhere that the arts are representational, or mimetic (sometimes translated “imitative”). Artworks are ontologically dependent on, and inferior to, ordinary physical objects, which in turn are ontologically dependent on, and inferior to, what is most real, the non-physical Forms. Grasped perceptually, artworks present only an appearance of an appearance of what is really real. Consequently, artistic experience cannot yield knowledge. Nor do the makers of artworks work from knowledge. Because artworks engage an unstable, lower part of the soul, art should be subservient to moral realities, which, along with truth, are more metaphysically fundamental and hence more humanly important than beauty. Beauty is not, for Plato, the distinctive province of the arts, and in fact his conception of beauty is extremely wide and metaphysical: there is a Form of Beauty, of which we can have non-perceptual knowledge, but it is more closely related to the erotic than to the arts. Second, although Kant has a definition of art, he is for systematic reasons far less concerned with it than with aesthetic judgment. Kant defines art as “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication.” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 44).