The age of art, and art as copying

A bison on the ceiling

In 1879 a Spanish landowner and amateur archaeologist, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, was digging for old tools in a cave on his land near Santillana del Mar, in northern Spain. A local man, Modesto Cubillas, had found the cave in 1868. One day Sautuola’s eight-year-old daughter, María, wandered off into a low side chamber, looked up, and saw animals. As the story is told, she called out something like “Look, Papa, bulls!” The famous words come from later retellings, not from a record made at the time. The ceiling carried a herd of bison painted in reds and blacks, with the natural bulges of the rock worked into their shoulders and haunches.

Sautuola published the find in 1880 with the geologist Juan Vilanova y Piera. At an international prehistory congress in Lisbon that year, leading French specialists, among them Gabriel de Mortillet and Émile Cartailhac, ridiculed the idea: Ice Age people could not have painted so well. Sautuola died in 1888 without having been believed. Only in 1902, after similar paintings had turned up in French caves, did Cartailhac publish a famous retraction, “Mea culpa d’un sceptique” (“A skeptic’s confession”), in the journal L’Anthropologie. Modern dating puts the great ceiling bison at roughly 15,000 to 13,000 years ago. Small signs elsewhere in the cave are older: a calcite crust that grew over one of them, dated in 2012, shows it was painted at least 35,000 years ago.

Notice what the story does. For twenty years the experts refused to believe that people so long ago could paint like that. Then the world accepted it, and the bison became the first plate in a history of art. But were they art to the people who made them? They left no words. The lecture behind this course points out that the cave is dark and the ceiling low, so it was hardly a gallery, and it adopts an old explanation: hunting magic. Paint the animal, and tomorrow’s hunt will go well. That idea came from Salomon Reinach, who put it forward around 1900, and from the priest and archaeologist Henri Breuil, who made it famous. By the 1960s André Leroi-Gourhan and others had picked it apart, and in the 1990s David Lewis-Williams proposed visions seen in trance instead. The lecture adds details that this course could not confirm for Altamira, such as spear holes in the bison, so they are left out. After more than a century there is no agreed meaning. What is agreed is the problem: we call these images art, and the word is ours.

Three riddles about a word

The lecture sets out three puzzles. The first is the bison: something that perhaps was not art to its makers is art to us. The second runs the other way. In the Middle Ages the thing people called an art was often not what we call art at all. The Latin word ars, like the Greek technē, meant a skill that could be taught: medicine was an art, carpentry was an art, rhetoric was an art. Late in antiquity, around the early 400s, a writer from North Africa named Martianus Capella set out the seven “liberal arts” in an allegory, and the scheme became the backbone of early medieval teaching: grammar, rhetoric, and logic, then arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Painting and sculpture were not on the list. Painters and sculptors were craftsmen who belonged to guilds. The first universities, at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, took shape later, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the lecture places them in the ninth, which is too early, though the seven arts were indeed taught in the Carolingian schools of that century.

The modern list is younger still. In 1746 the French writer Charles Batteux published The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, which gathered painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and dance under one idea: that they imitate beautiful nature. Paul Oskar Kristeller argued in two essays of 1951 and 1952, “The Modern System of the Arts,” that this grouping, as we use it, took shape in the eighteenth century and did not exist in ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance. Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art (2001) tells the same story at book length. Scholars still argue about how sharp the break was, but the main point stands. The category we now take for granted has a birthday.

The third riddle is the one the lecture treats as the hardest. In the spring of 1917, in New York, Marcel Duchamp took a standard porcelain urinal (by his later account, bought at the J. L. Mott Iron Works, a plumbing supplier on Fifth Avenue), turned it on its back, signed it “R. Mutt 1917,” and sent it to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. The society’s rule was that every artist who paid the entry fee, six dollars, could show. The urinal was kept out of sight during the show, and Duchamp, who sat on the society’s board, resigned. The original is lost; a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz survives, and authorized replicas have been made since 1950. In December 2004, five hundred British art-world professionals voted Fountain the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. The riddle is plain. The hardware store had a shelf of identical urinals. Why is only one of them art? Lesson 3 returns to it.

Why it matters now

Why spend an hour on a word? The lecture’s answer starts from a claim about our time: we live in an age of art. When most people spent their lives struggling for food and shelter, it says, taste was the business of a leisured few. Once basic needs are met, a third kind of demand appears. Two sofas can be made of the same materials and do the same job, and one sells for several times the price. A farmhouse and a villa both keep out the rain; the villa has more design. A handbag of leather and thread, or a phone that makes the same calls as another, becomes a luxury brand. Karl Marx, in Capital (1867), separated the use value of a thing from its exchange value. The lecture says design adds a third, an aesthetic value, and that in many markets it has come to outweigh the first two. Its name for our era is the age of experience. A 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review by B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” had said something similar about business: after goods and services, companies sell experiences.

The lecture adds that the wish for beauty is not a luxury of the rich. Even people with almost nothing decorate themselves. The evidence is old. At Blombos Cave in South Africa, researchers found 41 tiny sea snail shells, each pierced and showing wear from a string; a paper in Science in 2004 dated them to about 75,000 years ago. In 2021, a team reported 33 shell beads from Bizmoune Cave in Morocco, in layers at least 142,000 years old, the oldest shell beads known when they were reported. People have been making things to look at, and wearing them, for a very long time. What is new, in this reading, is how much of modern industry serves that wish.

That is why “what is art?” is no longer a classroom puzzle. It decides what a designer is selling, and what a museum is for. The lectures answer it with six keywords: imitation, freedom, form, authorization, exemplification, and experience. Each fixes a gap in the one before. This sorting into six is the lectures’ own scheme, not a standard list in the philosophy of art. But each keyword points to real theories with real authors, from Plato to the American philosopher Nelson Goodman, and this course checks each against them.

Art as copying

Start with the oldest idea, and the one still heard in museums: art copies. It has a famous story from each of three cultures. In Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, written in the first century AD, two Greek painters of about 400 BC held a contest. Zeuxis painted grapes so well that birds flew up to peck at them. Parrhasius answered with a curtain, and when Zeuxis asked him to pull it aside to show the picture, he found the curtain was the picture. Zeuxis conceded: he had fooled birds, but Parrhasius had fooled an artist. Pliny gives it as a story, not a record. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (about 8 AD), a sculptor named Pygmalion carves an ivory woman so lifelike that he falls in love with her, and Venus brings her to life. In China, the Tang art historian Zhang Yanyuan wrote in 847 that the sixth-century painter Zhang Sengyou painted four dragons on the wall of the Anle temple in Jinling and left out their eyes, saying they would fly away if he added them. People laughed, so he painted in the eyes of two, and thunder split the wall and the two dragons rose into the sky. From it comes the idiom 画龙点睛 (huà lóng diǎn jīng), “paint the dragon and dot the eyes.” It is a legend, but notice what it praises: the painted thing becomes real.

All three tales praise the same thing, which is indistinguishability from life. We still say it: “it looks so real.” The lecture asks whether that is how we should judge a painting. Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101), the great Song dynasty poet and critic, said no, in a famous couplet: 论画以形似，见与儿童邻, “To judge a painting by likeness is to see as a child sees.” The poem does not throw likeness away. It goes on to praise two painters for sparrows drawn from life and flowers that “transmit spirit” (传神, chuánshén), and then asks for something sparer than either. The Chinese ideal was likeness plus spirit.

Plato’s bed and Aristotle’s poet

The Greeks put the question most sharply. In Book 10 of the Republic, written in the fourth century BC, Plato has Socrates count three beds: one that exists in nature, made by God, which is the true bed; one that the carpenter makes; and one that the painter paints. The painter, he says, is “a creator of appearances,” and the imitator is “a long way off the truth.” Anyone, he adds, can make a copy of everything quickly by turning a mirror round and round. Plato concluded that imitative poetry should be kept out of a well-ordered city, because it “awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason,” and he called the conflict “an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” in Benjamin Jowett’s nineteenth-century translation. The lecture boils this down to a taunt: if you paint an apple to copy it, I would rather look at the apple. That is a fair edge of his argument, but not all of it. Plato also asks whether the poets know what they claim to know. He has Socrates ask whether any war was ever won on Homer’s advice, or any city better governed because of him.

Plato’s student Aristotle answered. In the Poetics, he argued that imitation comes naturally to people from childhood and that “no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.” In chapter 9 he drew the distinction on which the lecture leans. The poet’s job, he wrote, is not “to relate what has happened, but what may happen,” what is possible according to probability or necessity. History tells what Alcibiades did or suffered; poetry deals with the kind of thing that a certain kind of person would do. “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history.” (These are from S. H. Butcher’s 1895 translation.) On this reading, art does not copy surfaces. It copies patterns. A play about a fictional war can be true even if no such war took place, because it shows how fear, pride, and loyalty work. In the lecture’s phrase, art’s truth is the truth of experience.

The thrower who never threw

The lecture’s best example is a statue. The Discobolus, or discus thrower, by the Greek sculptor Myron, was cast in bronze around 450 BC. The bronze is lost; we know it from Roman marble copies. It shows a young man bent forward, the discus drawn far back, in the instant before the throw. The obvious reading is that Myron copied a real athlete. The lecture reverses it. When modern athletes try to throw in the statue’s pose, it says, the discus does not go far, so the pose is no photograph of real throwing. Rather, life has been shaped by art: we think of a discus thrower and see Myron’s.

The history supports the lecture’s point better than its details. At the first modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, the Greek champions were the home favorites. According to the Olympic database Olympedia, they were hampered by trying to “strike poses reminiscent of the ancient Greek statues.” An American college student, Robert Garrett of Princeton, who threw like a hammer thrower, spinning and swinging, won with 29.15 meters; Panagiotis Paraskevopoulos of Greece was second with 28.95. The Games then added a “Greek style” discus event, in 1906 in Athens and in 1908 in London: throwers stood on a small sloping platform and released the discus without turning. Martin Sheridan of the United States won the 1908 event with 37.99 meters. Classics scholars cited by Olympedia hold that the event rested on a mistranslation of a corrupt ancient text and was not the style the ancient Greeks used. So the lecture’s main claim holds, and in an odd way: modern people tried to throw like a statue, and even their idea of how the Greeks threw was partly a modern reconstruction. This course found no source for injuries, and the lecture’s claim of them is left out.

Oscar Wilde had put the idea more briskly. In his dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” first printed in 1889, a character argues that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” For Wilde it was a paradox, but for the lecture it is a sober point: art does not simply copy the world, because it teaches us what to see. Aristotle would not have been surprised.

Copying that creates

The lecture’s last example is a piece of Chinese writing. On the third day of the third lunar month in 353 AD, the calligrapher Wang Xizhi (王羲之) and some forty friends, officials and scholars, gathered at the Orchid Pavilion near Shanyin, now Shaoxing in Zhejiang, to float wine cups down a stream and make poems. He wrote the preface to their poems, the 兰亭序 (Lántíng xù), in running script, and it came to be called the finest piece of running-script calligraphy in China. The original is lost. According to a tradition, which cannot be checked, the Tang emperor Taizong obtained it and had it buried in his tomb when he died in 649. What survives are copies: stone rubbings, and tracing copies made by court calligraphers of Taizong’s time, in a technique of outlining each stroke and filling it with ink (双钩填墨). The best known is the “Shenlong” version, attributed to Feng Chengsu (冯承素), in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The lecture’s point is this. Nobody now living has set a copy beside the original. We do not love the Feng Chengsu copy because it looks like something we cannot see, but because the writing is itself superb. In the lecture’s words, copying is a pretext, and what we admire is the craftsman’s own mastery. “Imitation is not plagiarism,” it concludes: creative imitation is art. Notice the lecture’s own slip: it calls Feng’s version a freehand copy (临), but the Shenlong version is a tracing (摹). The correction helps the case in one way, since a tracing is more faithful and makes it harder still to say what we admire. It weakens it in another, for a tracer adds little of his own. The stronger case is the chain of calligraphers who learned their art by copying the Preface, each hand a little different. The lecture closes this section on a hinge: art is creative imitation, and above imitation we must add freedom.