"I hModerne & Actuele Kunst – Capita Selecta: Art Terms Artwork ARTWORK, WORK OF ART
1 De post-mediale conditie – ARTISTIC ARTEFACT: FINISHED OR WORK AS A VERB
Term for the artistic artefact
Artist ARTIST ARTISTIC, ARTISTRY – Either in its finished form (e.g.: John Constable - The Haywain (1821
– Or, more complicatedly, for the process of its making (work used as a verb).
– TWO SEPERABLE MEANINGS – The two elements of this idea, overlapping in meaning, raise very significant
Indispensable term in art historical and critical writing with two separable meanings: issues and problems in the historical study of art.
– Descriptive
The first is descriptive – WORK AS A NOUN: THING CREATED BY THE ARTIST
– E.g.: ‘an artist is someone who makes paintings or drawings’ In the simpler sense ‘work’ refers straightforwardly to the thing created by the artist,
whether it be, for example, a painting, sculpture, or drawing.
– Heavily laden with a range of evaluations – Work functions in this sense as a noun, a fixed thing.
The second heavily laden with a range of evaluations accrued over centuries of
usage – WORK AS A VERB: THE PRACTICES, SKILLS, IDEAS
– E.g.: when the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman said ‘the first man In the second sense, however, work – though retaining its meaning as an entity
was an artist’, what he meant was that humans were intrinsically creative created – refers also to the practices, skills, ideas, and decisions involved in its
beings production.
– In this second sense, it might be generally agreed, for example, that both – There is a more familiar usage that reflects this second sense when, for
Michelangelo and Michael Jordan were artists in their own chosen field, instance, a magazine editor might ask ‘What stage is the artwork at for the
however artist in this sense refers not to any specific activity but rather cover story?’ This is a reference both to one or more illustrations in preparation,
to the assurance and excellence (artistry) with which the activity is but also to the ongoing range of activities that will result in these finished
carried out – be it painting murals or playing basketball. illustrations becoming the magazine cover.
– An artist in this usage, then, is an excellent performer: the best, the
– DISPUTED
highest achiever, the greatest exponent. However, definitions of the process and activities involved in, and claimed to be
– JUDGMENT OF QUALITY relevant to, the production of artworks, are complex and sometimes disputed.
This sense indicates very clearly the judgement of quality built into the art – More traditional art historians and critics might argue that this is simply a matter
historical meaning of the term, present since at least Giorgio Vasari’s account of of the artist’s use of certain physical materials, techniques, and compositional
the Lives of the Artists (1550), written – not coincidentally – in that epoch of formats: the choice and application of, for example, oil paint using sable
greatness in western^ art identified as the high renaissance. brushes on a primed and stretched canvas surface.
– A full analysis of the artwork here should surely refer to all these decisions,
– ARTIST, ARTISANS AND CRAFTSPEOPLE(AND DESIGNER) preferences, and activities – including drawing outside and moving to the studio
Artist, as the term for the best or greatest, can be clearly differentiated from, and – as well as to the actual artefact finally produced by an artist such as
elevated above, at least two others used to describe kinds of producers (and people) Constable.
in visual media: artisans and craftspeople.
– A more recent word – designer – interestingly confuses this hierarchy of terms. – COMPLEX "WORK OF ART": RAISING QUESTIONS
– Designer is used to identify those gifted individuals who conceive, and It is possible to see now how complex ‘work of art’ as an idea might be: for to
sometimes themselves fabricate, successful clothes styles, or cars, or account fully for these decisions and preferences would also include understanding
furniture. and explaining why they were made by that particular person, at that historical
– Designer, then, is used on occasion both to mean the same as ‘excellent moment, given the particular set of wider social circumstances or conditions then in
artist’ – as in these examples – but also in the descriptive sense to refer place.
simply to someone who works with particular materials. In this latter usage – For instance, what kind of art academy or educational institution, if any, did the
it would be possible to say that a particular example was ‘a bad artist’ or ‘a artist attend?
bad designer’. – Was the artist a professional – attempting to make a living out of the activity
and therefore trying to reach a market of buyers – or an amateur, perhaps with
– ARTIST AS AN ABSTRACTION no interest in the preferences of others?
Artist is also often used as an abstraction, after the definite article – as in the – Is it possible, or relevant, to know how an artist’s class and gender background,
phrases ‘the artist in society’, or ‘the artist is against social conformity’. his or her views on the English countryside and the people who live there, may
– These usages indicate again the strong evaluative, judgemental, meaning have influenced their painting?
many writers have tried to attach to the term at particular moments in history. – Once these kinds of questions become admitted as relevant and important to
– These have included, for instance understanding the processes and activities involved in the production of
– Times when certain societies have become highly authoritarian artworks – questions that are central to the social history of art – then it is
– Jacques Louis David’s role as state director of the arts in France possible to see how even the apparently most straightforward art historical
after the 1789 revolution) ideas and terms pose difficulties and challenges that cannot be avoided by
– By contrast, transformed by liberatory forces seeking to harness cultural serious scholars.
intellectuals
– Kasimir Malevich in Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Autonomy AUTONOMY AUTONOMOUS, RELATIVE AUTONOMY
– TERM SUBJECT TO DEBATE – THE SPERATION OR DISTANCE FROM SOCIETY
In the period of modernity and emergence of abstract art created by avant-gardes In theoretical accounts of modern art, particularly abstract painting and sculpture in
since about 1910 (e.g.: the cubists), the term artist has been subject to intense the 20th C, autonomy designates the separation or distance or freedom from
rhetorical, socio political, and philosophical debate. Consequently, it remains society that certain artworks have been claimed, by critics such as Clive Bell and
confusingly both deeply ideological as well as the chief descriptive term for the Clement Greenberg, to have achieved.
manufacturers of artefacts such as paintings and sculptures.
, – ART FOR ART'S SAKE? place
In some respects autonomy is close to that of the (originally early 19th C) term art- – Paris in the c. 1850–1900 period: e.g.: artist Gustave Courbet, critic and poet
for-art’s-sake Stephane Mallarme´, writer and painter Maurice Denis, art dealer Daniel
– The belief or doctrine that modern, and particularly, avant-garde artists, in Kahnweiler) – to being used now in a general and trans historical manner.
escaping the restricting, old fashioned conventions and limits of traditional – In one current usage, for example, virtually all contemporary artists – or to
academic art and its institutions, could and should assert a ‘freedom to create’ qualify this, artists thought to be making art about life now using new materials,
without reference to the wider society, often perceived as corrupt and decadent. media, and techniques such as installation art or DVD – are referred to as
avant-garde.
– FREE WILL
In logical terms, however, it is much more sensible to talk of actual artists – as – AVANT-GARDE VIRTUALLY THE SAME AS CONTEMPORARY ART
human agents – having autonomy (free will to decide what to do) rather than The term in this sense has come to mean the same virtually as ‘contemporary art’ –
inanimate artefacts such as paintings. with the oddity that modern art has increasingly become an historical term,
– In political or philosophical theory (where the term originates), autonomy referring to artists and works in the period c. 1860 – 1960.
usually refers to individuals, groups of people, or nation-states.
– AVANT-GARDE HAS LOST ITS FUNDAMENTAL SENSE
– PARAODX OF AUTONOMY: INTERLOCUTORS TO DEFEND Given that there is no academic art now – that is, no art sponsored or championed
Paradoxically, the credibility of the notion of the autonomy, or radical separateness, by a single state run institutional authority guarding a notion of practice or the
of abstract painting – seen as a source of aesthetic value set against a corrupt and purpose of art – avant-garde has actually lost its fundamental original sense, which
limiting society (e.g.: abstract expressionist Barnett Newman’s Ulysses (1952)) – implied a challenge posed to traditional artists and official art institutions such as the
depends upon the authority of a critical claim conferred on particular artworks by Academie des Beaux Arts and the annual Salon exhibitions in Paris.
interlocutors ‘speaking for the work’. – 19th C avant-garde painters, such as Courbet and Camille Pissarro, set out
– In the 1960s modernist critics, such as Greenberg and Michael Fried, for a to oppose – in artistic and political terms – the social order in France,
while achieved this dominance over other interpretations of artworks by dominated in this period (c. 1850–1900) by the conjoined powers of the
painters Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella. monarchy and the Catholic church, subsequent republican government
administrations, and the commercial bourgeoisie. Both were revolutionary
– AUTONOMY AS A RELATIVE STATE
socialists and their paintings of workers on the land were intended as what
As the examples of Basque and Welsh people suggest, however, autonomy is
might be called visual criticisms of the capitalist social order in France (e.g.:
always a relative state and many recent interpretations of abstract painting (some
Courbet’s The Stonebreakers (1849) and Pissarro’s The Apple Eaters
closely relating these artworks to their social relations of production and
(1886)).
consumption) have since come to argue against the 1960s modernist emphasis
on their apparent autonomy, or separateness, from the culture and society in – ATTACK ON CONTINUED USE OF AVANT-GARDE
which they were produced. By the 1960s modernist critics had begun to attack the continued use of the term
avant-garde to refer to contemporary art, while, at the same time, they reconfirmed
– DISTANCE: METAPHORIC QUALITY OF AUTONOMY
its specific historical value in relation to French art in the later 19th C.
One of the concept’s near synonyms – distance – clearly suggests the metaphoric
– Clement Greenberg, for example, wrote of the shallow ‘avant-gardism’ or
quality always present in the term autonomy when used about abstract art.
‘avant-gardist’ manners, fashions, and pretensions of some abstract artists, in a
– ‘Distance’ has both spatial and temporal senses and both have an evaluative
time when the impetus for genuine aesthetic innovation in modernist art, at
element: the quality, that is, of being distant or ‘far away’ in place and time.
least as far as Greenberg himself was concerned, had waned. He attacked,
– By virtue of appearing not to refer to objects in the real world – objects and
particularly, what was called the ‘second generation’ of abstract expressionist
people represented naturalistically and through narrative conventions in most
artists – painters, Greenberg believed, who slavishly adopted the conventions
19th C art – abstract paintings are claimed to achieve this distance.
of earlier artists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
– Rejecting naturalism and narration, many artists in the 20th C did seek
radically to question the world, how it looked, how it might be represented, and Art history ART HISTORY ART HISTORIAN, ART HISTORICAL, ART HISTORIOGRAPHICAL
what it might be said to mean (e.g.: Alberto Giacometti’s boldly abstract
sculpture Head (c. 1928)). But in each and every case this was a decision – HISTORICAL STUDY OF ART
made by artists located in specific social and historical circumstances, often Name given to the historical study of art – involving such practices as curation and
acting according to an acute sense of how their societies were organised, and research, teaching, and the preparation for publication of essays, books, and
with a desire – sometimes utopian – to see them changed for the better. catalogues – work often carried out, though not exclusively, in scholarly or higher
education institutional contexts, such as universities and museums.
Avant-garde AVANT-GARDE AVANT-GARDISM, AVANT-GARDIST
– SINCE THE EARLY 20th C ART HISTORY AS ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE
– FROM FRENCH MILITARY TERM TO RADICAL ARTISTRY Since the early 20th C, though particularly post-WWII, art history in this broad
Previously a French military term referring to the outriders who would scout ahead of sense became an academic discipline (equipped with established curriculum and
the main troop of soldiers, avant-garde became applied to the formation of artists, standard aims and objectives), taught at undergraduate and postgraduate levels,
critics, patrons, collectors, and other members of the late 19th C French art world producing specialists and experts working in a variety of locations including teaching
thought of as advanced or radical in aesthetic, social, and political ways. in schools and universities, buying and selling art in auction houses and dealing
galleries, curation and conservation in museums, and, more recently, broadcasting
– BOHEMIAN
on radio and television. Art history’s disciplinary status consists, too, in sets of
Some of its meanings are close to ‘bohemian’
concepts and principles, objects and methods of study – along with some
– An older term, in use in relation to art in the early 19th C.
foundational arguments and values claimed to underpin and guide the general
– Both words refer to a lifestyle, symbolised sometimes by the reputedly
inquiry.
eccentric or dishevelled appearance of artists, as well as to their artworks,
attitudes, and beliefs. – DOUBT ABOUT CONSENSUR OVER KEY CONCERNS OF ART HISTORY
Since the early days of the discipline’s development in universities in Europe in the
– FROM LIMITED HISTORICAL REFERENCE TO TRANSHISTORICAL MATTER
early years of the 20th C, however, these basic elements have evolved and
The term has changed and broadened from containing a specific and limited
multiplied almost beyond recognition and it is extremely doubtful now that any
historical reference – that is, to some artists and writers active in a certain time and
consensus exists over the key concerns of the field of study as a whole.
, – Early disciplinary emphases – for instance, on establishing the authorial identify this critical perspective.
origins of artworks (who produced what, when, how, and usually to a lesser – Under its interpretation the significance of the work of the impressionists, of
extent, why) – was supplemented, and in some cases entirely transformed, by Paul Cezanne, of Picasso and Georges Braque, of Henri Matisse, and the
the development of other interests. These have included, for example abstract expressionists understood as canonically modernist ‘greats’ became
– The study of symbolism in art works (iconography) official: taught and reproduced as unassailable fact within the universities, art
– Social history of art analyses of the socio-cultural circumstances in schools, and museums.
which art is produced and consumed
– IRONIC DEVELOPMENT: AVANTGARDE VS. MODERN BOURGEOISIE
– Feminist interest in the status of women in the development of art, art
This development was ironic
institutions, and in culture and society as a whole
– Partly because some of the artists awarded (marginal) places in the modernist
– The psychology and psychoanalysis of art and artists
canon – for instance, Camille Pissarro, John Heartfield, George Grosz, and
– Semiological theories of how artworks contain and express meanings
the surrealists – had seen themselves as part of an avant-garde wishing to
through specific kinds of signs and communication systems.
undermine the whole of modern bourgeois society, including its stock notions of
– SERIOUS DISPUTES OVER THE FORMATION OF A CANON art and value.
Serious disputes, for example over the selection of objects of study for art history, – Ironic, too, is that some of the critics (e.g.: Clement Greenberg), complicit in
have persisted for many decades now, and suggest how art historical and art critical this institutionalisation of the modernist canon during the 1960s and 70s, had
concerns, particularly in the era of modernism, both overlap and divide at various also earlier professed a marxist opposition to the capitalist social order as a
points. whole.
– These arguments over the formation of a canon of artworks and artists – that
– PROBLEM OF SUPPOSED STRIC AUTONOMY
is, those items and producers deemed worthy of study as the ‘best’ and the
That said, modernist critics identified astutely the elements of technical and
‘highest’, according to certain criteria and values – indicate how the
aesthetic radicalism that constituted what they thought of as the best modernist art
apparently simple idea of a factual history of art contrasts with the actual
made between the 1860s and the 1950s
selections and accompanying claims articulated within particular art
– The impressionists’ intertwined rejection of traditional academic training
historical accounts.
focused on doctrines of compositional coherence and ‘finish’, and their urge to
– ART HISTORIOGRAPHY paint modern life in terms of narrative, symbolism, and subjective experience.
The study of the development of the discipline, which is often said to have begun – These artists, that is, were interested in their own modernity both as individuals
with the Lives of the Artists, first published in 1550, by Giorgio Vasari – sometimes and as members of new social groups and classes, and they wished to
called the first art historian – is called art historiography. represent the modernity of the world they inhabited, particularly the cities of
Paris, London, Berlin, and New York in the period between the 1860s and the
– WESTERN (EUROPEAN/NORTH AMERICAN) DISCIPLINE?
1930s.
Since at least the 1970s, however, it has become clear that art history grew up as a
– Greenberg and Fried asserted in the 1950s and 1960s, however, that the best
western, and specifically European/North American, subject though some of its
modernist art – cubism, Matisse’s paintings, the work of the best abstract
most influential scholars and institutions claim to be able to encompass the study of
expressionists – sought and achieved a decisive autonomy from this social
visual representations from all around the world.
world torn by world wars, revolutions, and the alienations of capitalist society.
– The very terms art and history, however – European in intellectual origins
By claiming this they attempted to break the long established link between
themselves – arguably lock such ‘world art’ studies closely into the interests
aesthetic and socio-political transformation in the visual arts. At worst, their
and values of a narrow metropolitan elite (white, middle class, predominantly
formalist perspective was a clear misreading, against the evidence that
male) based in the cities and cultures of the northern and western hemisphere.
they simply counted out of relevance. By the later 1960s they came under
Modernism MODERNISM/MODERN, MODERNISATION, MODERNIST, MODERNITY attack from many newly politicised artists and historians who began to recover
and rediscover the modern art and artists the modernist critics had left on the
– VISUAL CHARACTER OF SELECTED ARTWORK & INFLUENTIAL ACCOUNTS margins.
Central theoretical and critical term within the cluster of concepts and themes that
dominates discussion of the socio-historical place of art since the mid 19th C. Postmodernism POSTMODERNISM POSTMODERN, POSTMODERNIST, POSTMODERNITY
– Modernism refers (sometimes confusingly) both to the visual and tactile – POSTMODERNITY AND THE POSTMODERN
character of selected artworks produced in this epoch (‘the modernist tradition’) Term used to refer to fundamental developments in culture and the arts since the
and to influential accounts of them, concerned with their origin, meanings, and 1960s, although some critics and theorists have claimed that the origins of
significance. postmodern society can be found much earlier on in the twentieth century.
– IMPORTANCE OF CRITICS: INSTITUTIONALISED ORTHODOXY – Postmodernism, like some related terms (such as modernism and realism)
Its most important critics since about the 1910s have included Benedetto Croce, refers, sometimes confusingly, both to accounts, or theories of things, and to
Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss. the things themselves.
– These two senses are not actually finally separable – For instance, one of the earliest theorists of post modernism in
– Typical descriptive accounts of the appearance, say, of a cubist painting architecture, Charles Jencks, claimed that the new buildings he wrote
by Pablo Picasso entail interpretative assumptions and values informed about attempted to pastiche (copy) stylistic elements associated with
by modernist critical discourse. classicism (Charles Moore & Philip Johnson). This ironic and
– This is an important recognition because these critical judgements and ‘knowing’ attitude towards the past is a central characteristic of
theories – declaring modernist art to be a continuum of evolving, postmodernist thinking which intrinsically sees its theoretical and critical
autonomous, and self critical practices – came to constitute an predecessors retrospectively: in a concluded past. Jencks (the
institutionalised orthodoxy after the Second World War. postmodernist theorist) is critical of, for example, Le Corbusier (modernist
architect and theorist) for holding that the design and appearance (form) of
– LARGELY UNCHALLENGED ACCOUNT: FORMALISM new buildings could and should simply ‘reflect’ their practical function.
Until the 1970s this account remained largely unchallenged, although it had always Jencks, in contrast, emphasises the playfulness and rhetorical effects
offered only a partial account of the nature, development, and value of new art since of the buildings he calls postmodernist. A sense of historical, critical, and
Edouard Manet – regarded by these critics as the first modernist painter. creative ‘afterness’, then, characterises all postmodernist art and
– Formalism became the term – used in both positive and negative ways – to theorising, as the prefix ‘post ’ indicates.
