Is art modern? Kristeller's 'Modern System of the Arts' reconsidered

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 49, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 1-24

  Porter, James I ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 84868738601     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/aesthj/ayn054     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. Kristeller's view is adopted by Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, first published in 1977 (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1978), pp. 6-7, who claims to be following Bosanquet (but see at n. 7 below)
2. Cf. Philip Alperson and Noël Carroll, 'Music, Mind, and Morality: Arousing the Body Politic', Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 42, no. 1 (2008), pp. 1-15
3. here, p. 1: 'In the eighteenth century the Modern System of the Arts was born.... These are what we might call the arts with a capital "A"'. Kristeller's original article has been widely anthologized, most recently in Peter Kivy (ed.), Essays on the History of Aesthetics (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1992), pp. 3-64
4. An influential abridged version appeared as Paul Oskar Kristeller, 'Origins of Aesthetics: Historical and Conceptual Overview', in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1997), vol. 3, pp. 416-428
5. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
6. Paul Oskar Kristeller, 'The Modern System of the Arts', in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (expanded edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1990), pp. 163-227, 165
7. While Kristeller does not use the expression 'aesthetic autonomy', he invokes the concept through functionally identical ideas, such as the 'separation' or 'distinction' of the arts from 'other human activities' (ibid.), especially from 'morality' (p. 199), and not least through the invocation of '(modern) aesthetics' as a self-standing discipline (p. 165, and passim), which he takes to represent this very separation - as does Shiner, who adopts the language of 'autonomy' in Kristeller's wake (Shiner, The Invention of Art, pp. 4, 13-14, 23, 305, etc.)
8. Incidentally, Collingwood, one of Kristeller's influences (see next note), is explicit on this point: 'The aesthetic experience is an autonomous activity' (R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 40)
9. Julius Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur: Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte (Vienna: A. Schroll & Co., 1924), pp. 46-55
10. Kristeller, 'The Modern System of the Arts', p. 174 n. 79
11. etc. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, esp. pp. 1-56 (whence the distinction between fine arts and crafts (or 'useful arts'); the denial to Plato and other ancient Greeks of any concept of art; and the view of what counts as aesthetic autonomy)
12. For strikingly similar views, see also Władysław Tatarkiewicz, 'Art and Poetry: A Contribution to the History of Ancient Aesthetics', Studia Philosophica, vol. 2 (1937), pp. 367-418
13. Erwin Panofsky, "Idea": Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924; repr. of 2nd edn, Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1993), p. 2
14. Ernst Cassirer holds a similar view: 'Eidos und Eidolon', first published in 1924, reprinted in Birgit Recki (ed.), Ernst Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998), vol. 15, pp. 135-163, esp. p. 137
15. Eva C. Keuls, Plato and Greek Painting (Leiden: Brill, 1978), p. 56, and passim
16. See also Alexander Nehamas, 'Plato and the Mass Media', in Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1999), pp. 279-299 (citing Kristeller)
17. Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic, first published in 1892, 2nd edn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), e.g. p. 1: 'But the thing ['Aesthetic'] existed before the name'
18. Edgar Wind, (Laws, II, 671D): 'On Plato's Philosophy of Art', in id., The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, first published in 1932, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 1-20
19. Bernhard Schweitzer, Platon und die bildende Kunst der Griechen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953)
20. Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1929), pp. 8-15
21. For three differently critical views of Kristeller, see Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 2002), pp. 7-9
22. Charles Martindale, Latin Poetry and the Judgment of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004), pp. 31-33
23. and Walter G. Leszl, 'Plato's Attitude to Poetry and the Fine Arts and the Origins of Aesthetics: Part I', Études platoniciennes, vol. 1 (2004), pp. 113-197, esp. 117-130
24. Clement Greenberg, 'Towards a Newer Laocoon', in id., The Collected Essays and Criticism, first published in 1940, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986-93), pp. 23-38, vol. 1, p. 24; emphasis in original
25. Charles Batteux, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (Paris: Durand, 1747; repr. Johnson Reprint Corporation: New York, 1970), pp. ix, xiii
26. 'Towards a Newer Laocoon', pp. 28-31
27. Cf. Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques, L'art romantique, et autres oeuvres critiques, ed. H. Lemaître (Paris, Éditions Garnier Frères, 1962), p. 104, noting this very blending together of the arts, albeit lamenting it as a form of decadence
28. See Kristeller, 'The Modern System of the Arts', p. 169 (on Plato and Aristotle)
29. See Jerome Stolnitz, 'On the Origins of "Aesthetic Disinterestedness"', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 20, no. 2 (1961), pp. 131-143: 'The British did not invent and never use[d] the words "aesthetic" or "aesthetics", but it is simply frivolous to allow this to decide who 'created' aesthetic theory. The British were the first to envision the possibility of a philosophical discipline, embracing the study of all of the arts, one which would be, moreover, autonomous, because its subject matter is not explicable by any of the other disciplines.' Here, the obvious candidates are Locke, Hume, Burke, Addison, Priestley, and others
30. For the general thesis about the concurrence of the rise of empiricism and materialism and the rise of aesthetics, see Stolnitz, 'Locke and the Categories of Value in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory', Philosophy, vol. 38, no. 143 (1963), pp. 40-51
31. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), ch. 2
32. Dabney Townsend, 'Lockean Aesthetics', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 49, no. 4 (1991), pp. 349-361
33. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2006)
34. Cf. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 32-33: 'The proto-materialist impulse of [early German aesthetics] soon surrenders to a full-blown formalism; indeed no sooner has sensation been ushered into the court of reason then [sic] it is subjected to a rigorous discrimination.' But the pendulum eventually swings back the other way again, starting with the second half of the nineteenth century, as the accounts by Greenberg, T. J. Clark, and others make abundantly clear
35. Batteux, Les beaux arts, p. 18
36. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.11.1371b6-8; trans. Roberts. Batteux, Les beaux arts, p. 6 (where sculpture actually appears fourth in order, after painting and before dance)
37. Cf. Batteux, Les beaux arts, p. 183 with the ensuing discussion on the question of the relative capacity for metrical and rhythmical harmonies and cadences in Greek, Latin, and modern poetry, 'en faveur des Anciens'
38. Leszl, 'Plato's Attitude to Poetry and the Fine Arts', p. 119 suggests that Kristeller's source is (perhaps unconsciously) Hegel, and this may be right. But Kristeller fails to discuss Hegel, who presents problems of his own (see below)
39. Nor does Batteux appear to have changed his tune in his later work on Aristotle, Les Quatre Poétiques d'Aristote (Paris 1771), vol. 1, p. 283
40. See, for example, Hugo Blümner in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lessings Laokoon, ed. Hugo Blümner, 2nd edn (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880), vol. 1, pp. 45-47, on Diderot's scathing reception of Batteux's 'mindless schematism'
41. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970)
42. See further Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
43. and John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); also Wind. See further at n. 42 below
44. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis, IN.: Liberty Fund, 2004, pp. 80-81 (Treatise I, Section VIII, § II.5)
45. Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty, Treatise I, Section V, § XVIII
46. For further complicating arguments, see Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1996), ch. 1 ('Aesthetics and Deism')
47. For the claim about Shaftesbury, see Stolnitz, 'On the Origins of "Aesthetic Disinterestedness"', and others after him; for the quotation, see Stolnitz, ibid., p. 133
48. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, first published in 1735, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), p. 77 (§ 115)
49. A mistake not made by Stolnitz, 'On the Origins of "Aesthetic Disinterestedness"'
50. Kendall L. Walton, 'How Marvelous! Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 3 (1993), pp. 499-510
51. reprinted in id., Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (Oxford and New York: Oxford U.P., 2008)
52. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1999)
53. Susan Stewart, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 15-27
54. Thomas Reid, The Works of Thomas Reid: Now Fully Collected, with Selections from his Unpublished Letters, ed. William Sir Hamilton (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, and Co., 1846; repr. G. Olms, Hildesheim 1983), p. 498
55. The Works of Thomas Reid, p. 453
56. Beauty is tied to excellence and perfection, but is also tied to subjective feeling (pleasure). When Reid claims that beauty 'gives value to an object, abstracted from its utility' (ibid., p. 498), he is not concluding that this value creates a separate realm of objects or experience. Rather, value is added to existing objects and experiences. Thus, one can (and generally will) take pleasure and find beauty in a thought that is of great excellence and utility, be it moral or philosophical
57. John Dewey, Art as Experience, first published in 1934, (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), p. 214
58. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 214
59. See previous note. Similarly, T. J. Clark, 'Phenomenality and Materiality in Cézanne', in Tom Cohen et al. (eds), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) pp. 93-113; here, pp. 100-101 (in very Deweyan language): 'the aesthetic is part of the stuff of life...[, ] and the world ... is unthinkable save as a texture and structure of phenomena, of sensate "experiences".'
60. Cf. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 26 (emphasis added): 'It is customary, and from some points of view necessary, to make a distinction between fine art and useful or technological art. But the point of view from which it is necessary is one that is extrinsic to the work of art itself. The customary distinction is based simply on acceptance of certain existing social conditions.'
61. Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1994), p. 7
62. The view is practically a cliché and widely held, for example, even by Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 75
63. The same criticism holds for W. Tatarkiewicz, 'Classification of Arts in Antiquity', Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 24, no. 2 (1963), pp. 231-240, who follows Kristeller (and himself; see n. 4 above) in all the essentials
64. Contrast Andrew F. Stewart, Attika: Studies in Athenian Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age (London: Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 1979), pp. 111: 'That the Greeks had no word for "art" or "artist" has clearly little or no bearing on the problem at hand, for the appearance of the artist as an autonomous creator well after the codification of Greek aesthetic terminology for art was simply the result of an historical accident.'
65. See Walton, 'How Marvelous! Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value'
66. Further, Frank Sibley, 'Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic', Philosophical Review, vol. 74, no. 2 (1965), p. 165: 'Merely to learn from others ... is of little aesthetic value.... The crucial thing is to see, hear, or feel', etc
67. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale U.P., 1980), ch. 6
68. id., Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, first published in 1972, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1988)
69. See now also Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630 (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2006) on the collaboration of a wide array of non-aesthetic and aesthetic languages in another predisciplinary world, Elizabethan England
70. For a development of this argument, see James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Inquiry in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., forthcoming)