CORE TERMS/CONCEPTS

Traditionally, culture has been categorized in a variety of ways. For instance, it has been divided into three ranks: high, middle and low. Cultural production has also been discussed in terms of particular media or artforms – painting, photography, graphic design, etc. – and in terms of broader groupings such as the fine arts, the crafts, industrial design, the mass or electronic media. Such categories influence the way we think about, interpret and value visual artefacts, but they also have consequences in the world outside the mind. They have material consequences in terms of the policies and practices of educational and arts institutions, galleries and museums. To cite just one example: in 1979 an application to the British Arts Council for a grant to repair trade union banners was rejected on the grounds that the banners were craft not art, even though many such banners feature painted images. In Britain trade union banners are collected and preserved by the Museum of Labour History in Manchester, not by the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum or the National Gallery in London.

All visual artefacts, no matter what their medium, can be ranked according to a good-to-bad scale of aesthetic value, but in terms of the hierarchical schema high/middle/low it has been customary to assign the fine arts to the top and the mass media to the bottom. It is surely no coincidence that this hierarchical schema echoes the division of European society into three classes: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie or middle class, and the proletariat or working class. (A more complex model introduces the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpen proletariat or underclass.) Appreciation of the fine arts is primarily associated with the upper classes and appreciation of the mass media with the lower classes. Of course, a person's opportunity to enjoy a variety of types and levels of culture increases dramatically with the possession of wealth and leisure; consequently some rich people appreciate both high and low culture. The intelligentsia – a social group privileged in terms of cultural capital if not monetary capital – also has the opportunity to enjoy a broad spectrum of culture.

The Fine Arts

In the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, what we call 'the visual arts' were regarded as useful crafts on a par with shoemaking and cooking. The situation began to change from the Renaissance onwards as artists succeeded in raising the low social status of the visual arts by emphasizing their intellectual, theoretical and learned character, and by playing down their manual aspects. By the eighteenth century, according to cultural historians, the modern system of the arts (a grouping of five arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music) had become established. The use of the term 'fine' implied beauty, skill, superiority, elegance, perfection and an absence of practical or utilitarian purpose. The fine arts gained their specific character by contrast with mechanical, applied or useful arts and crafts. In some instances qualitative distinctions are made even within a single type of activity; for instance the distinction that has been drawn between architecture and mere building (a Gothic cathedral counts as architecture, whereas a bicycle shed counts as building).

Although historically the concept of fine art became associated with particular artforms – namely painting, sculpture and architecture – there is nothing intrinsic to the practices, materials and media of these arts which makes them 'fine'. This point is confirmed by the fact that many contemporary fine artists employ the new technologies of lithography, photography, film, video, holography, photocopying and computers. It is not the materials and technologies themselves which produce the distinctions between fine art, craft and mass culture, but rather the way in which those materials and technologies are habitually used – the different formal conventions employed and the social institutions within which artefacts are produced, distributed and consumed. Even the concept of art itself (the concept which enables us to distinguish works of art from non-art objects) can be regarded as a social institution. A satisfactory history of European art, therefore, ought to include a history of the concept 'art as well as a history of artists, works and patrons.

As already indicated, the distinction between the fine and the applied arts is based partly on the contrast between useless and useful. However, the idea that the fine arts are useless, that is exclusively concerned with the provision of aesthetic pleasure, is a dubious one. Architecture clearly serves practical as well as aesthetic functions. In fact, this is also true of the other arts: painting, for instance, serves ideological-symbolic ends and decorative functions. Our contemporary conception of works of art as purely aesthetic owes much to the existence of public museums and art galleries. (Many major museums date from the nineteenth century.) Isolated on the walls of these institutions, works of art derived from churches, country houses and public buildings are detached from their original physical settings and from the religious/secular contexts which helped to determine their meaning.

Curators usually arrange their collections in chronological sequences and in national schools. This kind of arrangement pleases art historians but, unfortunately, it fosters the impression that art's evolution is autonomous, growing primarily out of previous art rather than out of any external social demand. Once the museum existed, artists began to make works of art with that display context in mind. The result was that the size of works of art increased and many of them began to be about art or formal issues rather than about the world outside.

For centuries the visual arts were funded by, and served the interests of, the ruling classes of Europe and North America. When, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the upper middle class (that is, industrialists, businessmen, merchants, financial speculators) replaced royalty and the aristocracy as the dominant force in society, it inherited the culture promoted by the aristocracy. Even now, the fine arts are appreciated, supported and collected by a mainly middle-class public. Today, however, the fine arts exist in a culture dominated by the mass media. The fine arts continue, but in a sense they are a residue of a pre-industrial social formation. To some they appear marginal and anachronistic. Arguably, their fate resembles that of the horse in the age of motor cars, trains and aircraft.

Pre-industrial values are evident in an art such as painting where skilled handwork results in a small output of unique products which are, as a...