Decorative Arts: Laying the Groundwork

Abstract

Any discussion of arts requires some initial clari fication of fundamental issues. Right away, there are the obvious difficulties of definition, which continue to challenge us in interesting, and sometimes frustrating, debate. We will touch briefly on the history of the study of on how the special qualities and characteristics of the arts rely on specific and separate tools which we librarians need to know about and collect. First, we cannot even begin to discuss the arts without noting two major problems. The first is the definition issue, already mentioned. The very title of the ARLIS/NA conference session noted above?What Art and Architecture is Not: Decorative Arts?is an indicator that the terminology is ambiguous and confusing. Second, the arts (whatever they are) have not occupied equal stature with the arts in the way that they are perceived and studied (note the past tense, as the situation seems to be changing). No one suffers too much over what is meant by the but the arts are challenging to define and explain. And yet, all of us KNOW. Everyone KNOWS on a gut level what is meant by though we might come up with varying ways of describing them, like made for use, minor arts, functional art, functional decora tion, surface design, applied art, and so on, realizing, of course, that none of these phrases really does the job. More about nomenclature later. As far as status is concerned, we all sense the hierarchical place the arts occupy, vis-?-vis the arts. Just the terms fine versus decorative express an explicit hierarchical relationship. This distinction was unknown in antiquity, and is primarily a Western phenomenon. The word art is from the Latin ars, meaning skill, craft, knowledge. The ancient Greeks did not include the visual arts among the disciplines championed by their muses. Nor were the visual arts considered among the liberal arts of the early medieval scholarly world, which included grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. These liberal arts were distinguished from the so-called mechan ical, or manual of weaving, pottery-making, wood carving, navigation, armoring, and finally, painting, sculpture, and architecture. And these mechanical arts were not as exalted as the others. Somewhere along the way, however, this grouping of liberal and mechanical arts got reshuffled. Italian Renaissance scholars reassigned painting, sculpture, and architecture to the more exalted category that included poetry and music and sepa rated them from the other mechanical arts of weaving, pottery, etc., thus sowing the seeds for the classification we know today. How this dovetailed with the development of the concept of beauty for its own sake is beyond the scope of this discus sion. Suffice it to say, the concept of beauty for its own sake did not exist in ancient and medieval times. The visual arts?all of