On Creating Meaningful Art

marily with the creation of beautiful objects—usually used in plural. Or, (2) an activity requiring a fine skill.”14 The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines the fine arts as “those arts which chiefly depend on a delicate or fine imagination, as music, painting, poetry, and sculpture.”15 Finally, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica , Fine Arts is the name given to a whole group of human activities, which have for their result what is collectively known as Fine Art. The arts which constitute the group are the five greater arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry, with a number of minor or subsidiary arts, of which dancing and the drama are among the most ancient and universal. In antiquity the fine arts were not explicitly named, nor even distinctly recognized, as a separate class. In other modern languages besides English they are called by the equivalent name of the beautiful arts (belle arti, beaux arts, schöne Künste). The fine or beautiful arts then, it is usually said, are those among the arts of man which minister, not primarily to his material necessities or conveniences, but to his love of beauty; and if any art fulfills both these purposes at once, still as fulfilling the latter only is it called a fine art.16

14 Inc Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2003).

15 E. Cobham Brewer, ed., Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London; Paris; Melbourne: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1895), 462.

16 “Fine Arts,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 3: “Fenton, Edward” to “Finistere”, March 12, 2011, accessed June 15, 2017, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35561/35561-h/35561-h.htm#ar209.

What is common in these three definitions—the human creation of beautiful objects which depend on an artist’s fine imagination and that are appreciated primarily for their own beauty’s sake—is not only on par with Scruton’s treatment of the term aesthetic, but it rightly shows the connection between its development and that of the term fine arts.

A brief treatment of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy in his Critique of Judgment will demonstrate in closer detail how these distinctions were developing and what implications they had on how art would be created and viewed. He writes,

Art is distinguished from nature as making is from acting or operating in general, and the product or the result of the former is distinguished from that of the latter as work from effect . . . By right it is only production through freedom, i.e. through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action, that should be termed art . . . Art, as human skill, is distinguished also from science (as ability from knowledge), as a practical from a theoretical faculty, as technic from theory (as the art of surveying from geometry) . . . Art is further distinguished from handicraft. The first is called free, the other may be called renumerative (sic) art. We look on the former as something which could only prove purposive (be a success) as play, i.e. an occupation which is agreeable on its own account; but on the second as labour, i.e. a business, which on its own account is disagreeable (drudgery), and is only attractive by means of what it results in (e.g. the pay), and which is consequently capable of being a compulsory imposition.17

17 Immanuel Kant and Nicholas Walker, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 132-133.

Kant makes distinction between art, nature, science, and handicraft—all of which have in previous epochs bore the name art. But that was another era. In the Age of Enlightenment, humanity needed clearer distinctions to be able to properly discuss the faculties of the mind, particularly the abilities of human reason to contemplate beauty, which is in fact what Kant is doing in his treatment of aesthetics. For Kant, art is not a product of nature, but the skillful creation of the human will acting freely, e.g. without the burden of accomplishing some necessary business or working as a means of employment.

Art is not science in the sense that science is theoretical and art is a practice. Art is not remunerative in that it is not created for what it can do, necessarily, but for its own inherent beauty—even if that means the beauty is contained in what it does, i.e. the blades on a water mill are painted to be properly trimmed for its purpose. Though Kant’s technical distinctions prove helpful in articulating the nuances of the growing field of aesthetics, his approach is epistemological, not ontological, meaning he is interested in how humans know things. This means, for Kant, how one knows what is beautiful is the most important thing to decipher. His treatment of aesthetics will require further distinctions, and so he separates fine arts from art in general, writing,

Where art, merely seeking to actualize a possible object to the cognition of which it is adequate, performs whatever acts are required for that purpose, then it is mechanical. But should the feeling of pleasure be what it has immediately in view it is then termed aesthetic art. As such it may be either agreeable or fine art. The description ‘agreeable art’ applies where the end of the art is that the pleasure should accompany the representations considered as mere sensations, the description ‘fine art’ where it is to accompany them considered as modes of cognition.

Agreeable arts are those which have mere enjoyment for their object. Such are all the charms that can gratify a dinner party (etc.)...Fine art, on the other hand, is a mode of representation which is intrinsically purposive, and which, although devoid of an end, has the effect of advancing the culture of the mental powers in the interests of social communication.18

This is a mouthful, but it is a significant mouthful. The fine arts, in Kant’s view, are more closely associated with feelings of pleasure involving the beautiful, and are more than simply mechanical. Yet, they are not merely pleasurable in the sense they are simply agreeable to the senses; rather, they are cause for contemplation. In other words, the pleasure is not a pleasure that arises out of “mere sensation,” says Kant, but a pleasure “of reflection.”19 Additionally, in Kant’s view, the fine arts must also appear to be like nature, not made with a “laboured effect” as it were, even though to the one who looks upon the art it is apparent that it is art rather than nature. Kant is a little clumsy explaining this concept, but the idea is that fine art will demonstrate a consistency within itself that is natural to its likeness. For example, an evergreen tree will be rep -

18 Kant and Walker, Critique of Judgement , 134-135.

19 Ibid.