Back to the Bank
by Heather A. Fraser.
To many "average" Canadians, visual art is largely enigmatic.
And when it is wrapped in artspeak, a jargon-laden arts writing found in
art museums, commercial galleries and art magazines, it is nearly incomprehensible.
Artspeak can extol a sublime postmodern building based on Suprematist theory,
or deconstruct an angst ridden neo-post-painterly abstraction (I made that
one up). Artspeak seems to breech an important law of marketing: it appeals
to the smallest market possible, those who can understand it. And even most
of those people don't read such writing. In effect, the art magazine and
commercial gallery sell, and the museum promotes, an elite and intellectual
lifestyle. By buying the artspeaky magazine or by associating with the museum,
for example, one may have or appear to have such a lifestyle. How did the
visual arts develop this superior status?
A mere 600 years ago, the western 'arts' of sculpting, painting and architecture
were no different in status than the trades of smithery or shoe making.
Historians believe that the intellectual status of the visual arts appeared
first in Renaissance Italy. Two important factors were largely responsible
for the new elite status of the visual arts: a strong Italian economy; and
a mistake made by some over-zealous humanists.
In Italy prior to the Renaissance, guilds protected all art producers from
disproportions of supply and demand. Under guild rules, all members were
equal in status (and everyone had to be a member) so that no one lacked
work. During the Renaissance, demand for art grew: towns and cities burgeoned
with certain wealth; competitive (bloodily so) nascent duchies and other
principalities commissioned civic sculpture and architecture; and, of course,
the powerful and often lavish Church commissioned scores of works. Thus,
the disproportion between supply and demand grew quite small and reduced
the need for the protective guilds. Since an art producer unhampered by
guild rules could charge more money, and there was a favourable market,
many art makers wanted their freedom. Naturally, there was strong resistance
from the guilds (and the unpopular artisans whom the guilds protected).
However, a remarkable mistake made by the humanists (generally upper class
men) assisted the rebellious guild members in their efforts to achieve liberation.
We must remember that the Renaissance is so called after the 'rebirth' of
antiquity and its reverence for the human. The Italian humanists, scouring
Athens and Rome for remnants of ancient Greek culture or Roman copies of
it, became convinced, erroneously, that the ancients revered the sculptor,
architect and painter as much as the divinely favoured poet and scholar.
In The Social History of Art, Arnold Hauser states that Plato made
a fundamental distinction between visual arts and poetry. And that, in the
later years of classical antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages, there
was no closer relationship between art and poetry than there was between
science and poetry or between philosophy and art.
The humanists' mistaken claim that the ancients exalted the visual artist
helped emancipate the artists and gave them an instantly marketable history
and intellectual status. For the humanists, Hauser contends, visual artists
and their art were means of propagating the ideas on which their own intellectual
supremacy was based. And what the humanists did not know about antiquity
while extolling the modern artists' affinity to it, they sometimes made
up. A remarkable example of this form of inventive Quattrocento artspeak
(which is more confusing than jargon-laden) may be seen in the biography
of the Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi, Vita di Filippo di
Ser Brunellesco, by Antonio Manetti (Florence, 1423-91):
From Filippo comes the rule which is the basis of all that has been
done with this from that time on. It is the more remarkable, since it is
not known whether the ancient painters of centuries ago, who are believed
to have been good artists in the time when sculpture was at such a high
level, knew perspective and whether they applied it consciously. Even if
they [ancient visual artists] practiced it by rules (for not without reason
do I speak of it just above as science) as Filippo later did, still those
who could teach him had been dead for centuries and if any written record
is to be found, it is not intelligible. But his hard work and acuteness
either rediscovered or invented it.
When we think about the elite appeal of the visual arts today, it is instructive
to look back at how it all began. For the Renaissance artist, as Hauser
states, achieving superior status was not proof of the divine nature of
his art but rather an expression of his market value.
Back to the Bank