ARTS



Relationship between Art Objects and Industrial or Commercial Materials

Relationship between Art Objects and Industrial or Commercial Materials

Introduction

Paintings and power shovels, sonatas and submarines, dramas and dynamos--they all have one thing in common. They are fashioned by people. They are artificial, in contrast to everything that is natural--plants, animals, minerals. The average 20th-century person would distinguish paintings, sonatas, and dramas as forms of art, while viewing power shovels, submarines, and dynamos as products of technology. This distinction, however, is a modern one that dates from an 18th-century point of view(Mayer, 2008: 46).

In earlier times the word art referred to any useful skill. Shoemaking, metalworking, medicine, agriculture, and even warfare were all once classified as arts. They were equated with what are today called the fine arts--painting, sculpture, music, architecture, literature, dance, and related fields. In that broader sense art has been defined as a skill in making or doing, based on true and adequate reasoning.

The earlier and more comprehensive understanding of art can be seen in the Latin and Greek words that were used to describe it. The Latin word ars (plural, artes) was applied to any skill or knowledge that was needed to produce something. From it the English word art is derived, as is artificial, which means something produced by a human being. The Greek word is even more revealing. It is techne, the source for the term technology, which most people would never confuse with art.

The more general meaning of art survives in some modern expressions. The liberal arts, for instance, refer to the seven courses of university study that were offered during the Middle Ages: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The student who finished these courses received a bachelor of arts degree(Praeger, 2008: 136).

The liberal arts originated in ancient Greek and Roman attitudes toward different types of skill. The Greek philosophers, primarily Plato and Aristotle, did not separate the fine arts from the so-called useful arts, as is done today. They distinguished between the liberal arts and the servile arts, and fine arts were classified among the labors of the lower classes in ancient Greece and Rome.

The word liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, meaning "suitable for a freeman." Studies that were taken up by free citizens were thus regarded as the liberal arts. They were arts that required superior mental ability--logic or astronomy, for example. Such arts were in contrast to skills that were basically labor (Richardson, 1991: 305).

Servilis, the Latin word for slavish or servile, was used to describe the handiwork that was often done by slaves, or at least by members of the lower classes. The servile arts involved such skills as metalworking, painting, sculpture, or shoemaking. The products of these arts provided material comforts and conveniences, but such arts were not themselves considered beautiful or noble.

The new technology and scientific discoveries were radically changing the pace of life and the way society perceived the nature of things. Whereas in the past, life had been static, science and technology ...