The Concept of ‘Art’ is Thoroughly Modern

When discussing art, architecture, and really any beautiful thing made by man, the frame of the conversation is always tainted by a thoroughly modern lens. How people today conceptualize ‘art’, especially ‘fine art’ is altogether different than when people thought of art in the past. 

The most clear proof of this difference is through semantics.  It is obvious, not only by their writing, but also by the words used that the Ancient Greeks and Romans did not think of art in the same way at all as contemporary people do.  

In Classical Greek the word for art is tékhnē (τέχνη), the root word for the English word ‘technology’.  That is to say by their definitions, an art was synonymous to a skill or a craft. Specifically we would describe art in their sense as a practical knowledge or practical science.  Carpenters, Poets, Sailors, and Sophists were all technicians to the Greeks each with their own art.  The lack of translational clarity in their sense of techne to ours of ‘art’ is obvious.  In their writings the Greek tied their sense of beauty with purpose and goodness rather than emotional experience .  In short, they would not consider  ‘art for art’s sake’ to be anything meaningful.  

Furthermore this can be seen in the Greeks’ word for the artist himself,  kallitéchnis (καλλιτέχνης), a literal translation being beautician or beauty technician.  The sculptor or painter was not doing a different thing than a potter or a carpenter. It would seem like this should be obvious. In fact the simple craftsmen without as much concern for the beauty of their works were called technitēs (τεχνίτης). It seems that the class of ‘artists’ were the craftsmen particularly working on making beauty in their work.

The Romans it is certain were near the same mind as the Greeks.  In Classical Latin the word for artist was artifex from their words ars, artis and facet, facere.  The word ars for art or skill, came from the Proto-Indo-European root word ar- meaning put together, and facet, facere meaning to make.  These were also clearly just craftsmen.  There is no trace in the practical mind of the Roman  of anything like the modern priest-class which is the contemporary Master of Fine Art.

As an interesting diversion, the Modern Romantic loves the idea of the nine muses from the Ancients, but their conception of them is not quite ancient.  To the Modern, the Muse is an emotional inspiration of human creativity. One speaks of their ‘Muse’ as their inspired access to the divinized realm of human emotion.  To the Greek they were not quite this, rather demigods that possessed men with a creative madness in the pursuit of beauty, harmony, and form. This would seem backward of their technical treatment, almost as a counter example. The Ancients seems to have a healthy respect for the excesses of the artist, they acknowledge that it is divine but that it is indeed mad. The Modern aspires to a divine madness but without the pagan's numinous fear of the gods, seems to settle for a human one. The difference is easily felt.

Researcher reconstruction of the awe-filled interior of the Parthenon of the grey-eyed Athena

When the Greek makes his sculpture, aiming at purity of form, harmony, and virtue, he is doing certain things.  He is practical in a way the Modern cannot be. That is to say, he is practical in a beautiful way.  When the modern man looks at the Greek copies, he sees nothing useful and thinks that that is good.  The most pure art is ‘art for its own sake’ he says, and thinks that the Greek statue is most pure.  Rather the Greek thought of his art in a much wider, mimetic way.  Idealizing beauty in its reality was more, not less real to the Greek.  And this pure Platonic ideal of the image had essential purpose.  The public works of statuary and architecture were ordered toward the public good.  The ideal Greek form was for the inspiration of virtue in a didactic way, something almost completely unseen in modern public art installation.

When the Modern makes his sculpture, he is doing in his mind the most important thing: to be seen as mad.  For if he is insane, he clearly cannot be convicted of trying to teach anyone anything.  For teaching is bad.  Rather, the goal of his sculpture is to demonstrate that he assuredly has the inspiration of the relevant Muse and can be trusted to be a righteous priest of human emotions as a mode into a delusional divinity. He craves to be as mad as the Ancient, but cannot be, so he settles for art not even as practical or as real as theirs.

The modern normative sense of art as seen in their curiously abstract paintings, mixed media sculptures, and free-form spoken word poetry is meant to be something distinct among human works, but this is demonstrably a historically unique idea.  No culture in history has espoused this idea. It is not to be found among the Chinese, or the Egyptians, or the Byzantines, or the Incans, or the Samoans, or the Mohammedans or anywhere. This unique experiment has clearly failed as judging by its fruits, so what must done is to discard it.  ‘Art’ is not a separate class of things but rather must be reintegrated into all works and arts.  To do otherwise is to fall into the errors of material, utilitarianism, and romanticism.

This is utilitarian as the modern cannot accept beauty as useful.  This means that utility can only in the practical and material; beauty can only be found in the superfluous and immaterial.  Further it is romantic as this art can only access the divine through the emotions and is not a practice in synthesis of real goodness and beauty, let alone a real god.  Beauty cannot be real enough to the modern to judge one’s emotions, and therefore must be immaterially ‘subjective’ to the artist’s inspired vision.

‘Art’, as modernly understood thus, is a false entity filled with errors and disjunctures.  These errors are inherent to attempting to calling art a distinct pseudo-spiritually inspired work separate from folk arts and crafts.  Art cannot do this without loosing both its purpose and sanity. Perhaps men would do better to merely make things beautifully integrated with virtue and their purpose rather than creating a unique class of things called ‘art’.