Fine Art, Not So Fine Art, and the Problem With Categories
At my recent art exhibition opening at Barcelona’s Flash Gallery, three complete strangers separately exclaimed to me, “You’re the artist? You don’t look anything like your art!”
I’m not sure if it was my gender, age, or style of dress that they found so surprising, but whatever it was, I was clearly causing some cognitive dissonance. Perhaps if I had purple hair or was dressed all in black, they wouldn’t have been so surprised.
But the real issue, in my view, was not my look — it was these people’s own cognitive structures and the fact that they could not place me neatly into them.
Don’t Put Me In A Box
Although most of us want to be perceived as the complex individuals that we are rather than be reduced to a label, other people’s brains are subconsciously trying hard to categorize us.
Categorization is not a bad thing. On the contrary – it is a core part of how our brains construct knowledge and make sense of the world. We subconsciously construct categories of objects based on visual, functional, and behavioral similarity. We construct categories of people based on a wide range of characteristics including visual, cultural, religious, ethnic, occupational, and many more. And we construct abstract categories that represent concepts like “art.”
Much as we want to say, “don’t put me in a box,” a brain that is unable to form and use categories would be severely impaired. Cognitive categories are what allow us recognize. And once we recognize something, we have access to everything we know about that category of thing. We can fill in the gaps, determine whether the thing is important or not, and make predictions and decisions. Without the ability to categorize, each sensory input would be something novel and untethered to past experience, leaving us unable to make sense of our complex world.
But cognitive categories also have their downsides. Our brains construct categories based on what they experience, either directly or indirectly through, for example, other people and media. The characteristics that are experienced most frequently become our definition of “normal” or “ideal.” Outliers are often viewed as poor examples and might be treated with suspicion. I once flew with someone who was nervous about our female pilot, probably because their mental category of “pilot” was centered around a white man and hence a woman didn’t seem like a particularly good example of a pilot. We rely so heavily on our mental categories that if someone defies easy categorization, we might vilify or ignore them rather than confront the mentally painful truth that our own knowledge constructs are incorrect or incomplete.
Relying on our mental categories can be particularly fraught when they are not shared. It’s often said that pornography is something that you recognize when you see it, but what one person recognizes as pornography another person may well recognize as art. To deal with this diversity of conceptions and create a shared understanding, humans have an ingenious solution: they consciously create categories defined by a specific set of characteristics – a top-down, rather than organic, category construction. Geometric shapes are defined by specific rules. Living organisms are defined, at least by biologists, by a taxonomic system. And art is defined by … well, you know it when you see it.
With increasing abstraction of concepts, a shared definition can be increasingly difficult to achieve. The stakes can also be higher as people strive to bend the world to their own logic. So important is the definition of some of these concepts – race, marriage, and family, for example – that the fight to define them has at times turned violent.
The question of how we define art and artist has similarly been the subject of ongoing protest and controversy.
Art Boxes
Humans have been making art since the very beginning of their time, but our current conceptualization of art – and therefore artist – is much more recent. The term “fine art,” in particular, appears to date only from the 18th century when it was likely first used by the French philosopher Charles Batteux, in his 1746 book, Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même Principe ("The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle").
The term fine art both reflected and formalized a particular Euro-centric conception of art, or at least of “good” art. Fine art was something that was for pure aesthetic enjoyment rather than utilitarian purposes – this elevated it above craft. It was perceived as coming through a western academic tradition – this elevated it above non-Western art and also effectively excluded women since they were systematically denied access to traditional art academies. And it included only certain media – initially only painting (notably oil on linen), sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry.
This conceptualization of fine art imposed a hierarchical definition of art that, despite ensuing controversies and battles over the nature of art and artists, continues to exert considerable force in the art world.
In fact, rather than expand the category of fine art to include a greater diversity of artists and materials, new categories of art and artists were created – outsider art, folk art, naïve art, graphic art, illustration, and the inherently racist category of primitive art.
These categories made it possible to acknowledge other types of art without ceding the high ground of fine art, both in terms of its status and associated economic value. It gives the appearance of allowing other artists a place at the table while simultaneously further marginalizing them.
Artists themselves – and I am one of the guilty – have perpetuated the hierarchical categorization of art by seeking the validity of category inclusion. We claim the label of fine art – stretching it just enough to make room for our own gender, academic background, or art material of choice – in order to differentiate ourselves from the not-so-fine artists.
And we don’t stop there. We claim “working artist” to differentiate ourselves from mere hobby artists. We claim “academically trained artist” to differentiate ourselves from artists who got their training in other ways. Alternatively, we claim “self-taught” or “intuitive” artist to highlight that we are self-made rather than products of stodgy academic institutions. We claim “ceramic artist” to differentiate ourselves from the lower brow potters.
If You Must Put Me in A Box, Make Sure It’s a Big Box
Is “fine art” a conceptualization that has outlived its usefulness?
We can’t get around that fact that human brains categorize and label – both subconsciously and consciously. But we can examine our own conceptions, break down unhelpful stereotypes, and work to discard antiquated categories and cultivate new ways of thinking.
Do we artists benefit from squeezing ourselves into a category that is not of our own making in order to legitimize ourselves? Do we end up limiting ourselves when we create ever more micro-categories in an attempt to stake our own unique claim in the art world?
I personally see more downside than upside to clinging to an 18th-century invention that idealized and elevated the art of white male western artists trained in classical art academies. This conception of value in art has admittedly expanded somewhat, but it still has much of its baggage intact as reflected in the artists represented in major museums and galleries and in the artists and art materials that command the highest prices.
I realize that the fine art label is probably not going to disappear any time soon. One of the drawbacks of our cognitive categories is that once we have spent effort constructing them, we are often loath to give them up even when they are no longer useful. People tend to be uncomfortable when they can't categorize something or, as happened at my art opening, when their mental categories are brought into question. And when it comes to higher stakes conceptualizations, things can get heated.
Does it really matter so much whether Pluto is a planet? Or how you define family? Or whether artwork is “fine art?” To people with a vested interest, it absolutely matters. Some scientists are still fighting to reinstate Pluto’s planet status. Some politicians view the fight to define “family” as more important than the fight to reduce poverty. And in the art world, many of those who profit from art will fight to maintain the fine art category precisely because it is exclusionary.
But I’m ready to ditch fine art. Along with that, I think we need to be careful of all labels that seem designed to elevate oneself at the expense of others – working artist, professional artist, academically trained artist. And it is definitely time to jettison labels that serve more as artist qualifiers than useful descriptors – woman artist, emerging artist, self-taught artist. In the end, none of these categories actually communicate much about an individual artist or the art they create.
For now, I’m going to simply call myself an artist who creates art.
I realize that “artist” is still a box that people might not be comfortable putting themselves into. But it’s a big box – one that, for me, feels spacious enough to create freely but contained enough to feel at home.
My next step is revamping my website to do away with the fine art label with my bigger-box identity in mind!
How do you define yourself?
“And if you must put me in a box
Make sure it’s a big box,
With lots of windows
And a door to walk through...”
