Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘ Modern System of the Arts ’ Reconsidered James I. Porter Downloaded from Kristeller’s article ‘ The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics ’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller’s historical account can be questioned; bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘ the modern system of the arts ’ appears to have been neither a system nor an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller’s own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘ fine-arts ’ objection has been cleared away. at Sultan Qaboos University on November 12, 2010 What was the fi rst man, was he a hunter, a toolmaker, a farmer, a worker, a priest, or a politician? Undoubtedly the fi rst man was an artist. Man’s fi rst expression, like his fi rst dream, was an aesthetic one. Barnett Newman (1947) Consider the famous anecdote about Sophocles in Ion of Chios ( FGrHist 392 F6). At a dinner-party on Chios the presence of a very handsome young male slave prompts Sophocles to quote a phrase from Phrynichos, to which a literal-minded schoolmaster takes exception, and Sophocles fl attens him by citing instances of poetic licence in the use of colour-terms from Simonides and Pindar. There is abundant evidence that in preliterate cultures the composition of songs is a pro- cess in which discussion and criticism, often passionate, play an important part — and inevitably so, because any aesthetic reaction implies preference, and preference implies criticism. Is anyone prepared to say that the conversation described in Ion fr. 6 was impossible in the Bronze Age? I, for one, am not. K. J. Dover (1993) In 1951 – 52, Paul Oskar Kristeller published an article in the Journal of the History of Ideas that proved to be a classic, ‘ The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics ’ . Classic is perhaps too modest a description, as the leading ideas in Kristeller’s piece were subsequently adopted as established orthodoxy among historians and British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 49 | Number 1 | January 2009 | pp. 1 – 24 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayn054 © British Society of Aesthetics 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] 2 | JAMES I. PORTER philosophers of art and by intellectual and cultural historians, and they are now more or less legion. 1 More recently, his views were developed at book length by Larry Shiner, though with no real change in substance.2 Classicists, who stand least to gain from Kris- teller’s views, have been remarkably quiet about them, and a few have adopted them (see below). The challenges to Kristeller’s central ideas have been, to my knowledge, mini- mal. In short, we are having to do here no longer with an academic thesis, and not even with an orthodoxy, but with a dogma. My intention in the present paper is to confront Kristeller’s article directly, as I believe it contains a number of untenable and potentially quite damaging assumptions and conclu- Downloaded from sions, both about the history of art and aesthetics (ancient and modern), and about the fun- damental nature of aesthetic refl ection and inquiry. I will begin by summarizing Kristeller’s views. Then I will show how his position rests on a narrative description of what it depicts, one that is by no means unassailable. Alternative stories are available, and these offer dra- matically different pictures of the same ground that Kristeller covers in his essay. Thirdly, I bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org will demonstrate how the evidence Kristeller seeks to muster for his argument in fact stands in contradiction to his primary claims, taking Charles Batteux as my chief exhibit (Batteux is Kristeller’s key and best single witness). Then I will turn to the fallacy of aesthetic autonomy, the emergence of which Kristeller’s historical picture is designed to explain. At issue here is whether aesthetic refl ection (or theorizing) is conceivable in the absence of a theory of aes- thetic autonomy, and consequently whether art itself is conceivable as a category of thought before the eighteenth century. Kristeller’s answer is ‘ No ’ , but this seems wrong in every possible way — historically, logically, and methodologically. Finally, I will offer a few hints as to how one can go about conducting a more satisfactory account of the rise and evolution of at Sultan Qaboos University on November 12, 2010 aesthetic thought in classical antiquity, once Kristeller’s objections have been cleared away. Kristeller’s views about the modern system of the arts (so-called) are as vital to the way we grasp the Greek and Roman past as they are to the way we grasp the modern world. What follows will pertain to both. The Modern System of the Arts By ‘ modern system of the arts ’ Kristeller understands ‘ the irreducible nucleus ’ of fi ve art forms that together comprise the fi ne arts (beaux arts ): painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry. Decorative arts, engraving, gardening, dance, theatre, opera, ‘ and fi nally elo- quence and prose literature ’ were added as an afterthought, historically speaking; these, in any event, never won universal consensus, unlike the fi ve previous arts, which did. The point is that 1 Kristeller’s view is adopted by Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists , fi rst published in 1977 (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1978), pp. 6 – 7, who claims to be following Bosanquet (but see at n. 7 below). 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; 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. An infl uential 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. 2 Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). IS ART MODERN? KRISTELLER’S ‘ MODERN SYSTEM OF THE ARTS ’ RECONSIDERED | 3 the fi ne arts so constituted are set off from crafts, sciences, ‘ and other human activities ’ : they enjoy relative autonomy, are freed from utilitarian objectives, and are guided by no moral agendas. This separation is supposed to have occurred in the eighteenth century.3 The ancients, by contrast, had no such unifi ed conception of art or beauty. A series of negative comparisons ensues. The ancients did not separate moral beauty from beauty in art. They did ‘ not treat music or the dance as separate arts but rather as elements of certain types of poetry, especially of lyric and dramatic poetry ’ . The ‘ emancipation of instrumental music from poetry ’ occurred only late in the day. The social and intellectual prestige of painting, sculpture, and architecture ‘ was much lower than one might expect from [the] actual achievements ’ that were made in Downloaded from these areas. ‘ No ancient philosopher . wrote a separate systematic treatise on the visual arts or assigned to them a prominent place in his scheme of knowledge ’ (p. 174). In short, we have to admit the conclusion, distasteful to many historians of aesthetics but grudg- ingly admitted by most of them, that ancient writers and thinkers, though confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither able nor bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art from their intellectual, moral, religious and practical function or content, or to use such an aesthetic quality as a standard for grouping the fi ne arts together or for making them the subject of a comprehensive philosophical interpretation. (ibid.) Kristeller is far from being alone in his disparagement of the ancients ’ capacity for aes- thetic refl ection. The kernel of his historical thesis derives from Julius Schlosser’s Die Kunstliteratur , while his philosophical assumptions are derived at least in part from R. G. Collingwood, as Kristeller acknowledges. 4 Another early exponent of the same view is at Sultan Qaboos University on November 12, 2010 Schlosser’s contemporary, Erwin Panofsky, who accuses Plato of failing to think aestheti- cally because he was unable to separate metaphysical from aesthetic questions. Accord- ingly, Plato was incapable of contributing to art theory. 5 This conclusion about Plato is 3 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. 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.