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Oct
02
2009

The Enlightenment and the Art Public

The Enlightenment and the Art Public

Spanning the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, the Enlightenment produced greater philosophical thinking than it did fine arts.  That said, the Enlightenment was crucial for a new way of thinking about art and art making.  In the beginning, the production of visual art was under the protection and sponsorship of the State, since the establishment the Royal Academy in 1648.  This Academy was a model followed by other major nations, which were aware of the need to monopolize the arts and to harness them to the needs of the government.  Because the people of France paid for the education of artists, the French government, the major sponsor of art, held Salons, or public exhibitions of state-sponsored art, outside on the grounds of the Palais Royale the new home of the Duc d’Orleans, who had an appetite for beauty and pleasure.  But after the first show in 1704, this site of balls and fêtes proved unsuitable for large exhibitions and the later salons were held at the Palace of the Louvre.  Here in the palace the works of art could be protected from the weather and displayed to their best advantage.  The Salons were held after 1737 every year or every other year on August 25th in the Salon carré of the Louvre and ran ten days to four weeks, attracting the art public and the art critic, both new social entities.

The concept of a “public” for art was a new one as was the idea of publicaly exhibiting art, and inevitably, someone from the “public” would emerge with an opinion. This opinionated member of the public who dared to speak and write an to publish his views, much to the dismay of the artists, was the “art critic.”  By exposing the artists to the public, these salons opened the artists to public scrutiny and public criticism and the new species, the art critic, demanded that the artist be accountable to the public.  Artists, previously answerable only to elite groups of collectors and fellow artists, now needed public approval to succeed.  The public, then as now, encompassed all levels of social and economic classes and all levels of education and constituted a community of interest, breaking social hierarchies down into the new notion of a “public,” explored in 1985 by Thomas Crow in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris.  The creation and existence of this public brought with it new problems for the artist: what to represent in terms of subject matter; how to represent in terms of style; and who should be allowed to represent and who was allowed to speak to and for the public?

Also new were the private art collectors who became the chief patrons of modern artists.  Patronage was split between the aristocrats such as Madame de Pompadour and the newly rich middle class who preferred genre painting, that is scenes of everyday life, over the more prestigious history painting, depicting noble heroes of the distant past. Art collecting became a sign of wealth and taste, and during this period, several important large collections came on the market, such as the works owned by Queen Christina of Sweden, acquired by the French banker and art connoisseur, Pierre Crozet. French artists were exposed to a historical spectrum of Western art and had a wide range of artistic possibilities to choose from.  Despite the presence in France of the classical Baroque styles, the Baroque was systematically toned down in its dramas and was softened for the civilized and essentially domestic style of Rococo. Although much of Rococo art was produced for the aristocrats and rulers of Europe, the style was paradoxically involved with the concept of the “natural,” a reaction against the formality of society and its artificial and unnatural mores.  The pastel colors and gentle brushwork of the Rococo artists and the romantic themes made the paintings ideal for the domestic interiors of those who could afford them.  But during the same period, the public taste for middle class scenes made genre artists, such as Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, famous for their depictions of everyday life.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
25
2009

The Enlightenment and Society

The Enlightenment and Society

The question was how to create new world without God?  What would be the basis of this new life?  Spirituality was replaced with technology; religious laws were replaced by rational virtues, ethics, and morality.  “Bon sens”, extolled by René Descartes, could be determined by logical deduction, based upon observation of human psychology and conduct.  The Enlightenment sought empirical and pragmatic foundations for society for the material era.  The expectation was that peace and harmony would come into being through the minimum use of laws, instead of the heavy-handed tyranny of kings. In the past, the law was the will of the sovereign, in an Age of Reason, law was based upon the will of he people who voluntarily came together under the light hand of the state. The Enlightenment was characterized by this strong sense of humanity and by a belief that all humans are basically good and are deserving of basic rights and freedoms.  Humans could come together and rule themselves according to rational principles that all can come to know and live by.

The challenges to the authority of religion as a form of governance were directly related to the rise of nationhood. As early as 1534, Henry VII broke the power of the Catholic Church in England by the Act of Supremacy and made himself the head of the Church of England.  Without refuting religion, the King asserted the primacy of a nation in its own affairs.  The rising tide of the Protestant Reformation allowed European princes to likewise breakaway from the interference of the Vatican.  The Protestant idea that each person has a direct line to God and therefore could worship as s/he pleased led to not only a split between the Catholics and the Protestants but also among the Protestants themselves.  The result was the Thirty Years’ War, which ended in 1648.  After three decades of conflict, it was clear that religious ideology could never be allowed to disrupt the order of society and the power of religion as a dominant force was at an end. It is perhaps no coincidence that René Descartes who died in 1650 decided that the only point of certainty was the self: “I think, therefore I am.”  But Descartes was concerned as to the ground of his thinking—how did he know he wasn’t hallucinating or deluded?   He reverted to his faith in God, that God would be the guarantor of the validity of his thinking.  In his appeal to God, Decartes would be the last of his kind.  Indeed, one hundred years later, Diderot would assert that “…the philosopher teaches the priest what the gods are.”

The philosophers substituted “natural religion,” called Deism, a kind of watered-down theism and reconstructed religion in line with modern science for the mysticism of traditional “superstition.”  The abolition of God was also the abolition of hierarchies and the social theory of the Enlightenment stressed the discussion of social problems from the standpoint of the individual–the “true person,” not from the perspective of the state, which was only an artificial machine. The philosophes were the intellectual (and spiritual) leaders of Europe.  Natural Law was at the center of Enlightenment thinking and would be the instrument that severed morality from religion and would establish new bases for morality and ethics. If God was to be found anywhere, it was in “natural law.” Philosophers thought deductively about the origins of human society.  In Two Treatises on Government, 1680-90, John Locke projected his mind back in time and imagined a race of humans who were free and equal, their “natural” state” or State of Nature.”  The question that bothered Locke was why people had given up their freedom to come together into society, which so clearly curtailed their natural freedoms. He reasoned that the state was the entity that gave surety to these rights and used the words “social compact” or agreement that people made with their government to come together under “natural law.”  What made Locke so attractive to the budding American revolutionaries was his stress on the individual making a free decision to live within a state that, in turn, had the obligation to protect “natural rights.”

In his book, The Social Contract, 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau also went back to nature and considered the question of why humans would give up their natural freedoms.  His philosophical deductions led him to also consider the consequences of their decision to create a “Social Contract.”  Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, 1754, asserted that the original human equality had ended due to the creation of private property.  The first person, who asserted “this is mine” ended the natural paradise of equality, according to Rousseau.  This idea that private property was to the root of the Fall of Humanity would be taken up by Friedrich Engels in 1884, and, indeed, Rousseau made a suggestion that the problem of inequality of wealth could be remedied by redistribution.  But beyond equalizing wealth, there is a general will of the people, which ultimately overrules private interests. Equality is natural law and natural law is based upon reason.  Rousseau understood the state as a function of the will of the people who look to the state to preserve and respect their “inalienable rights.” Even as Rousseau was writing, Adam Smith was rethinking the role of government, recasting the activities of society, not in terms of “natural rights,” but in terms of the new economic realities of mercantile society.

In 1776, Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, proposed that the sole purpose of a state was not to protect the rights of citizens but to safeguard the protect economic activities and property.   Like Locke and Rousseau, Smith was being perfectly rational.  Starting with a founding assumption that wealth was served the greater good, he gave priority to commerce, assuming that the wealthier the population, the wealthier the nation.  In separating the state from the economy and giving the economy free rein so that the “invisible hand” could enrich everyone, Smith also released the state from its moral obligation to protect people and gave voice to a new kind of political economy based upon the interest of capitalism.  Smith’s ideas are eminently reasonable and rational but they also give pride of place to impersonal forces—science, technology, and industry—that will change the face of Western society and reorder how people would interact with one another.  Smith himself was sympathetic to the plight of the poor and concerned over how the factory system dehumanized people but the logic of the “invisible hand” of capitalism gave rise to a ruthless exploitation of human capital in the name of economic prosperity of the nation.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
18
2009

The Enlightenment and Reason

The Enlightenment and Reason

The Enlightenment is also referred to as The Age of Reason, a time period that stems from the awakening of European interest in science in the Seventeenth Century and ends with the unreason of the French Revolution at the end of the Eighteenth Century.  The importance of individual scientists, such as Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, and the significance of the voyages of world explorers, such as Captain Cook, indicate a cultural shift away from spiritual interests and toward worldly interests.  The need for worldly answers to cosmic questions overtook the spiritual dogmas, and the desire to explore the real world for commercial purposes proved to be more compelling than religious revelation.

Over time, it became impossible for educated persons to accept theological limitations of Church dogma and more difficult to explain the world as “God’s will.”  Philosophy would take the place of established religion as a way to explain the world, and, by the Eighteenth Century, philosophy was tasked with the problem of establishing a new system of ontology (a theory of being) and epistemology (the ground of knowledge) to replace God’s plan for the world.  Faced with the apparently irrefutable findings of scientific discoveries, philosophers developed contempt for religion and welcomed the new light into a world long shrouded in the darkness of misguided belief in a Deity.

If God, Voltaire declared, did not exist, we, the people, would have found it necessary to invent a supreme being.  Voltaire’s cynical statement comes very close to the Modernist concept that all aspects of culture are constructed. Most of the Enlightenment philosophers and political thinkers were Deists.  They believed in a God but rejected organized religion as superstition. Severing themselves from the comforts of certainty that religion brings caused pain.  “I grieve,” Denis Diderot mourned, “that I can no longer believe in God.” The philosophers were at the beginning of a process that moved Western civilizations away from the received wisdom of religion to the relativism of philosophical systems.  Because the Enlightenment was based upon the scientific model, there were earthly answers for everything. One conceived of a hypothesis and then tested the theory by employing empirical methods. The universe was conceived of as, not a heavenly realm, but a simple clock, a logical and rational mechanism.  Human beings were mere cogs, and insignificant ones at that, in this vast impersonal, soulless, uncaring machine.

The notion of the universe as a gigantic machine reflected the new concern with new technologies that were connected to the Industrial Revolution.  Human beings, not God, were in the center of this new universe.  The philosophers were confident that God’s mercy, capricious as it was, could be replaced by human reason and rationality.  The Enlightenment, in its own way, was based upon a belief system, every bit as powerful as the Christian system that was being phased out. The “faith” of the philosophers was based in Reason.  “Dare to reason…Have the courage to use your own minds…is the motto of the Enlightenment,” Kant declared. Reason was the basis of science: one made logical deductions and accepted the inevitable conclusion.  If the universe was rational, a machine, then society could also be rational and human beings could come to logical and orderly decisions on their own by reasoning like scientists.

Philosophers assumed that there was a rational order of eternal truths and philosophy in the Age of Reason would seek to ground their deductions in universality and transcendence.  They also assumed that human beings were perfectly able of recognizing the validity of these truths and that people would act accordingly. Reason was a certain kind of thinking based upon a logical progression from hypothesis to conclusion.   It was “self-evident,” a favorite term of the philosophers, that humans would not only accept truths derived from the mechanism of Reason but would also act according to these truths in their everyday lives.  The idea that people might act irrationally or counter to their best interests or that they might oppose “self-evident” truths was not an option.

Secular intellectuals believed that the time of Christianity had come and gone and that religion would be replaced by scientific, social and economic Progress. Progress was the logical outcome of the forces of Reason.  Progress, the philosophers and scientists assumed, had been impossible when timeless spiritual values dominated society.  From the Seventeenth Century, progress was the inevitable product of unstoppable technological advance fueled by scientific discoveries and inventions.  The Age of Reason was grounded in an optimism that Progress would improve humanity, now cleansed of superstition.  Rational thinking could create a regularized system for living, a system that was logical and produced social order. Rather than explained as a sudden strike from an angry God, natural events were understood as having a scientific explanation.  Order came from laws that arose from Nature, not God.  These laws were inevitable and irrefutable, or “self-evident” because they were, a priori, logical. French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau based his ideas about the human condition upon a Natural Law could be utilized to resolve conflicts so that humans could come together and freely negotiate a Social Contract.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
11
2009

The Enlightenment: Introduction

The Enlightenment: Introduction

Like any great cultural change, the Enlightenment was long in gestation.  By the Eighteenth Century, a critical mass of philosophical thinking and social custom had emerged, and, with it, certain famous intellectual heroes.  The Enlightenment can be understood precisely in terms of its entomology–that which sheds light: light into the darkness of religious “superstition”.  The principal conflict of the Enlightenment was the contest between established religious beliefs and a growing body of scientific knowledge that grounded knowledge, not in the will of God, but in an exercise of empirical evidence.  Upon this dialectic, struggles for social, political, and economic parity would be launched and would last to this very day. It is important to remember that the Enlightenment way of thinking is very Western and is a singular result in a particular place due to the impact of science and technology, resulting in the “death of God.”  Other areas of the world, such as Africa, were left out of technological progress and its benefits, and other areas, such as the Mid-East chose to not follow the secular path of the Europeans.  The result, two centuries later, would be a world split between those who took part in “Modernism” and those who did not.  The Enlightenment was a Western phenomenon, which established not only new philosophical ideas concerning the grounds of knowledge but also new ideals, such as “liberty, equality and fraternity,” “all men are created equal,” and the “inalienable right” of the “pursuit of happiness.”  These ideals would not be forgotten, but it would take time for the Enlightenment to become more than the ideals of speculative philosophers and to become a gradually unfolding reality.

A complex phenomenon, the Enlightenment was defined by one central question: how can life be lived and understood without God?  If God was “dead,” as Friedrich Nietzsche proposed, then the Deity was certainly an animated corpse, going to its demise, kicking and screaming, and becoming reanimated at unpredictable intervals.  The Enlightenment was confronted with Counter-Enlightenments, such as Romanticism and Catholic revivals, but politics, society and economics continued their inexorable march down the secular path.  Over time, Christianity came to occupy a smaller place in Western culture and ceased to be the basis for society’s belief system.   Once religious faith had permeated Western life and the answer to all questions was “God’s will.”  Unquestioning belief in God was challenged by two forces that proved to be critical to Enlightenment thinking.  First, was the idea  of “natural rights,” that is, the notion that people were created free and equal and had, as human beings, certain rights that could not be violated.  The concept of “natural rights” would be articulated by Enlightenment philosophers, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Thomas Jefferson but it dated back to the Twelfth Century and was present in a nascent from during the Medieval era.  The second was the explosion of scientific experimentation and hypothesis that shattered doctrines supported by the Church. Although there were certain scientific discoveries that particularly irked the religious authorities, such as the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, the combined weight of empiricism and the scientific method undermined the ability of religion to insist upon unquestioning belief.  Doubt entered into society.  Western culture shifted decisively towards secular questions and secular answers.

The result of secularism was a ripple effect that questioned the validity of the “divine right to rule,” creating a question of how could society be governed without God.  It was not just a question of government in the sense of whether or not to continue with Kings and Emperors but government in the sense of self-governance.  Without religious edicts telling people what to do, what kind of system would take the place of God’s law?  Just as scientists rewrote the knowledge of the universe, philosophers sought a new epistemology or ground for social relations. But even more urgent was the problem of knowledge.  Without God, what was knowable and how?  A new epistemology of knowledge also had to be established.  The new philosophical system proposed a new society and a new form of knowledge that would have profound impact upon art and artists, creating new ways of defining both art and artist and developing an entirely new branch of philosophy called “aesthetics.” The idea of “artistic freedom” is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment introduction of the concept of the “individual.”  The idea of the defiant artist, challenging the establishment and shocking the conservative public is an Enlightenment concept of rethinking received wisdom.

The profound secularization that is the Enlightenment has installed suspicion of authority, tradition, and divine right to rule…at least in the West.  Using the deductive and logical practices of science, rational thinking, and the powers of human reason discovered universal laws, which appear to have taken the place of God, the Enlightenment ended eighteen hundred years of spiritualized thinking.  As Thomas Carlyle said, “Philosophers strove to sink the supernatural to the natural”.  The concepts of “Nature” and “Natural Law” and “Natural Rights” and “Progress” could be used as powerful weapons against traditional powers that once ruled by “divine right.”  The Enlightenment also had a dark side.  The proponents of this unsettling upheaval in society were able to go only so far in their thinking.  The concept of “nature” or the “natural” could be used as powerful weapons to deny participation and power to those declared to be outside the confines of progress, such as women and people of color who were tied to Nature and therefore were beyond the forces of History and thus, the democratic fruits of the new social system.  Emmanuel Kant once stated, “If someone asks are we living in an Enlightened Age today?  The answer would be, ‘No,’ but we are living in an age of Enlightenment.”  The Enlightenment could not guarantee fully enlightened thinking, but the alternative to the Enlightenment, with all of its a prorias was, as David Hume, remarked, “..stupidity, Christianity, and ignorance”.  The men who made the new laws were bold, brave and even arrogant, quite capable of using enlightened modes of thinking to justify slavery and imperialism, all in the name of European superiority.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Sep
04
2009

Podcast Episode 1 What is “Modern?”

WHAT IS MODERN?

What were the social, political, economic and philosophical conditions that made the “Modern” possible?  The podcast discusses the four revolutions of the eighteenth century that brought about unprecedented change to the Western world.  Each revolution impacted the artists and redesigned the world of art making, resulting in a kind of art called “modern.”

 

 

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Sep
04
2009

What is “Modern?”

What is “Modern?”

“Modern” is essentially a Western concept, based upon cultural forces, specific to European countries and transplanted to their colonies.  As a small and compact continent, Europe was a site of circulation for new ideas and new ways of living in the world.  Other continents, such as Asia and Africa, were isolated and self-sufficient and would not be touched by European ideas and values until the age of imperialism.  The Middle East, equally self-sufficient, chose, according the Princeton professor, specializing in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, to sidestep, not so much modern life, but the implications of modernism.

The characteristics or events usually associated with the “modern” were invented in Europe, developed in Europe, and played out to their logical (and often tragic ends) in Europe.  Both as a British colony and as an independent nation, America played a significant role in developing the modern way of life, but the American “modern” would be significantly different from the European “modern.”  When did “modern life” begin? The answer depends upon one’s historical perspective.  Some would argue that modern life, the life we in the West have inherited, can be traced back to the Renaissance period in Europe. For the purposes of this website, it is more efficient to move beyond the nascent beginnings of the middle class and capitalism and international trade to the outcome of these tendencies, the most significant of which, it might be argued, being humanism. For the modern age, the human being is firmly situated at the center of the universe.

Most discussions of the Modern can be divided into distinct parts, all of which are interlocked. There is no “first,” there is no “beginning,” in absolute terms.  For convenience sake, it can be stated that the Seventeenth Century saw a significant shift away from God and towards scientific discovery and experimentation. The trend to empirical observation and material research not only expanded the discourse of knowledge based upon observable facts but also threatened the role of religion in society.   By the Eighteenth Century, the culture was more secular than spiritual and a new breed of people, called “new men” were able to build upon the scientific bases to develop a more rational means of production that evolved into industrialization and mass production.

These “new men” were an ever-growing group of professionals, doctors, lawyers, financiers, and business owners who were middle class and ambitious.  They financed, built and serviced the Industrial Revolution, supported on the backs of the lower classes. Women formed a support system, either at home or in the fields or in the factory and were denied the benefits of the modern. Human labor was needed for industrialized modes of productions and people, both proletariat and peasant, began to drift away from traditional artisan occupations and rural employments and towards factory work.  Mass manufacture and trade encouraged the increase in the size of cities, and by the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, London was the largest city in Europe.

Urbanism and industrialism and the trend away from an agrarian society, which was ruled by the landed gentry, began in England and America.  The combination of a concentration of people in urban areas and alternatives to traditional life styles that brought pressure on the political system to grant “natural rights” to the people. The concept of a “natural” right to freedom and happiness was essentially a middle class and secular concept.  As opposed to pleasure being the sole pursuit of the upper classes, human beings had the “natural” right to be happy.  As opposed to the Divine Right of Kings, as sanctioned by God, people began to think of themselves as the “natural” rulers of their own society.  Monarchs ruled with the consent of the governed and had the obligation and responsibility to preside over their subjects wisely and benevolently.  The Seventeenth Century Benevolent Despot gave way to the Citizen King or Enlightened Monarch, answerable to the people.

The emerging “Modern” way of life would have major consequences upon Western culture.   The “modern” that was emerging was unprecedented and needed to be articulated.  Explaining the social and cultural and economic changes was the task of the philosophers who referred to their period as the “Enlightenment.”  Enlightenment philosophy articulated a social reaction to scientific achievements, was the achievement of several societies.  French and English and German philosophers all made major contributions to Enlightenment thought, the cornerstone of which was Reason. The center of philosophy was human reason, not God’s ideals.

Human reason was capable of establishing a new kind of society, based upon what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called “the Social Contract,” established by the free will of humans who agreed to come together and live in democratic harmony, without Kings and without God dictating the terms.  The philosophy of the Enlightenment inspired two political revolutions, one in America and one in France, and was the impetus for political change in other parts of Europe.  Thus the “Modern” can be characterized by a number of “revolutions:” 1. A philosophical revolution,  2. A social revolution, 3. A political revolution,  and 4.  An economic revolution.  The task of artists, poets, novelists, musicians, and the visual artists was to give subjective expression of the new age in new languages, which would produce new forms.  The artist is the product of all of the “revolutions” of the Modern, which are discussed in the next chapters.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


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Sep
04
2009

Podcast Introduction to Soundbytes in Modern Art

EXPLAINING SOUNDBYTES IN MODERN ART

Welcome to the twenty-first century.  Millennial Education for the millennial mind is offered to students of art and art history.  This podcast explains how listeners can use and employ the series which presents discussions of modern art, artists and aesthetics in small size “bytes,” suited to the student in a hurry.

 

 

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