The rose is red: from Denslow's Mother Goose, W.W. Denslow, 1901 (hand-lettering by Fred W. Goudy)Art has been used in English from the 13th Century. It was widely applied without predominant specialization, until the late 17th Century, in matters as various as mathematics, medicine and angling. In the medieval university curriculum, the arts… were grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Artist, from the 16th Century on, was first used in this context, though with almost contemporary developments to describe any skilled person.
Jack be nimble: from Denslow's Mother Goose, W.W. Denslow, 1901 (hand-lettering by Fred W. Goudy)
The emergence of an abstract, capitalized Art, with its own internal but generalized principles, is difficult to localize. There are several plausible 18th Century uses, but it was in the 19th Century that the concept became general.
Deedle, deedle, dumpling: from Denslow's Mother Goose, W.W. Denslow, 1901 (hand-lettering by Fred W. Goudy)
It can be primarily related to the changes inherent in capitalist commodity production…[as a]…defensive specialization of certain skills and purposes…not determined by immediate exchange (value)….This is the formal basis for the distinction between ….fine arts and useful arts.
As these practical distinctions are pressed, within a given mode of production, art and artist acquire ever more general (and more vague) associations, offering to express a general human (i.e. non-utilitarian) interest, even while, ironically, most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, are effectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.
Cock a doodle doo: from Denslow's Mother Goose, W.W. Denslow, 1901 (hand-lettering by Fred W. Goudy)
Art: Raymond Williams, edited excerpts from Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 1976
