Art as Communicable Knowledge

Abstract

The following remarks are addressed to the notion that fine art is a special mode of thought and knowledge. This speciality is most interesting, for we suppose the value of that knowledge shares in the value we place on knowledge in general, and, additionally, in the special value we place on art for both aesthetic and nonaesthetic reasons. The implications this holds for a theory of art education are obvious. Insofar as aesthetic speculation may regard the experience of fine arts as essentially an exchange of knowledge, this would certainly be considered as contributing to a theory of fine arts as communicable knowledge. As a kind of knowledge, even special or unique, it must be supposed as well that it can be learned and promoted by educational means. Art as knowledge in the above sense is especially, perhaps peculiarly, a modem innovation. In the traditional view, from the Latin ars and the Greek techne, art was any knowledge that served as a skill in transforming material. Art was craftsmanship and learned as such. That the experience of art was a form of divine or inspirational madness was never entirely absent from classical aesthetics. Inspired madness was more a disease of poets than artists and was not believed by the ancients to be a functioning, valuable knowledge. The fine arts stood in sometimes subservient, sometimes purely mystical relation to philosophy, the paragon of true knowledge. St. Thomas did speak of art as intellectual, its apprehension the response of the maxime cognoscitivi sight and hearing. But art was still essentially making, a job, in the classic sense,