I love Brahms but I personally can hear that he is much “newer” than Beethoven.
Also I think that idea of canon and novelty as only explanation of quality of art is oversimplified. It is very complex topic about which hundreds of high quality books are written.
Second half of 19 century and the beginning of 20th century was marked by two efforts to recreate previous styles.
First was eclectic architecture which tried to recreate previous styles formaly. The second one is Art Nouveau, which tried recreate a spirit of Medieval and other arts. Mostly all this efforts failed as we could easily recognise now 19 and 20 century artworks.
Note that I said entering canon has little to do with quality. People have the idea that great art is made by great artists, but these things are separate. A great artist, under today’s rules, is one who advances the art. The art the great artist makes may be very poor, because it’s an early attempt at a new style, like the novels of James Joyce and William Faulkner.
Your point about architectural styles is good, but I’d be cautious about inferences drawn from decor & the ornamentation of buildings, including 19th century revivalism, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco.
(The grouping together of structure and decoration under the term “architecture” always confuses me. It must make architecture very difficult.)
There are two opposed philosophies of art. The first, the Platonic, says that art should reinforce society’s traditional and transcendent “truths”. This basically controls Greek art from Homer until at least just before Euripides, and then Roman and Christian art, up until about the time of Shakespeare (and was still the “common-sense” view of society at large through maybe 1800). The second, the subversive, says art should focus our attention on the cracks in society’s traditional “truths”. This has dominated from maybe 1800 until now.
The more affordable an art form’s products are, the more subversive it becomes.
“Fine art” decor (or at least revivalism, nouveau, and Art Deco), is made to decorate and celebrate the homes and the places of powerful of the wealthy and the powerful. As such, it runs in the opposite direction from the rest of the art world; it is subservient to the current power structure. Hence all these backwards-looking movements in decor, like Art Nouveau and Art Deco, which resurrect Platonic styles.
A lot of art is not made either to reinforce societal truths or to subvert them. If it’s made for any purpose, it’s just to look pretty. This applies especially to the more “ornamental” and “decorative” arts and crafts. This sort of art is not talked about much, precisely because it does not deal much with “society’s traditional and transcendent truths” (whatever that means) so it’s harder to say anything worthwhile about it, but it’s probably a lot more important and salient to most folks than things like painting or sculpture, which are what first comes to mind when talking about “art”.
When I say “the fine arts”, I’m trying to exclude all that, and talk about the stuff that gets studied in college and written about in journals, and whose artists used to be patronized by nobility and now get invited to parties in Manhattan.
True, but it’s not clear that it should be excluded, especially when talking about things like decor. For that matter, one could argue that even the cheapest and most trivial cultural artifact reflects the society it is a product of, and to this extent it is “subservient” to social truths. And even the most “subversive” art ends up saying a lot about the way our society actively celebrates some sort of subversion. Which is certainly a social truth that has its own notable legacy and perhaps even “tradition”.
When the question is how artists are accepted into the canon defined by the elite gatekeepers—the journal editors, the critics, the department chairs at major universities—then those things should be excluded, because they aren’t part of the phenomenon being studied. They are more strongly governed by different rules.
I love Brahms but I personally can hear that he is much “newer” than Beethoven. Also I think that idea of canon and novelty as only explanation of quality of art is oversimplified. It is very complex topic about which hundreds of high quality books are written. Second half of 19 century and the beginning of 20th century was marked by two efforts to recreate previous styles. First was eclectic architecture which tried to recreate previous styles formaly. The second one is Art Nouveau, which tried recreate a spirit of Medieval and other arts. Mostly all this efforts failed as we could easily recognise now 19 and 20 century artworks.
Note that I said entering canon has little to do with quality. People have the idea that great art is made by great artists, but these things are separate. A great artist, under today’s rules, is one who advances the art. The art the great artist makes may be very poor, because it’s an early attempt at a new style, like the novels of James Joyce and William Faulkner.
Your point about architectural styles is good, but I’d be cautious about inferences drawn from decor & the ornamentation of buildings, including 19th century revivalism, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco.
(The grouping together of structure and decoration under the term “architecture” always confuses me. It must make architecture very difficult.)
There are two opposed philosophies of art. The first, the Platonic, says that art should reinforce society’s traditional and transcendent “truths”. This basically controls Greek art from Homer until at least just before Euripides, and then Roman and Christian art, up until about the time of Shakespeare (and was still the “common-sense” view of society at large through maybe 1800). The second, the subversive, says art should focus our attention on the cracks in society’s traditional “truths”. This has dominated from maybe 1800 until now.
The more affordable an art form’s products are, the more subversive it becomes.
“Fine art” decor (or at least revivalism, nouveau, and Art Deco), is made to decorate and celebrate the homes and the places of powerful of the wealthy and the powerful. As such, it runs in the opposite direction from the rest of the art world; it is subservient to the current power structure. Hence all these backwards-looking movements in decor, like Art Nouveau and Art Deco, which resurrect Platonic styles.
A lot of art is not made either to reinforce societal truths or to subvert them. If it’s made for any purpose, it’s just to look pretty. This applies especially to the more “ornamental” and “decorative” arts and crafts. This sort of art is not talked about much, precisely because it does not deal much with “society’s traditional and transcendent truths” (whatever that means) so it’s harder to say anything worthwhile about it, but it’s probably a lot more important and salient to most folks than things like painting or sculpture, which are what first comes to mind when talking about “art”.
When I say “the fine arts”, I’m trying to exclude all that, and talk about the stuff that gets studied in college and written about in journals, and whose artists used to be patronized by nobility and now get invited to parties in Manhattan.
True, but it’s not clear that it should be excluded, especially when talking about things like decor. For that matter, one could argue that even the cheapest and most trivial cultural artifact reflects the society it is a product of, and to this extent it is “subservient” to social truths. And even the most “subversive” art ends up saying a lot about the way our society actively celebrates some sort of subversion. Which is certainly a social truth that has its own notable legacy and perhaps even “tradition”.
When the question is how artists are accepted into the canon defined by the elite gatekeepers—the journal editors, the critics, the department chairs at major universities—then those things should be excluded, because they aren’t part of the phenomenon being studied. They are more strongly governed by different rules.