Faith Ringgold, American People Series #20: Die (1967)
We philosophers believe that there is something called ‘art’, which has an essence. And so our goal is to offer a general definition, encompassing all art made anywhere anytime. Art historians have a different goal. For the art historian, the aim is to describe diverse visual cultures, treating art as a form of cultural expression. What, then, is Venetian art and American art? That’s a different question. Some art affirms the values of the society. That was the case in the Venetian Republic. And in some other societies, art aims at political critique. This is what we often find in contemporary America. We can learn about both societies by comparing and contrasting their artworks.
Much important Venetian art is religious, while other works are political. More exactly, since the church and the state were mutually supportive, it’s generally impossible to make a hard and fast distinction here. The sacred work in the churches of Venice supported the political goals of the Republic. By contrast, since the 1980s, much of the best contemporary American art has been critical of the present state of things. And according to some Marxist critics, like T. J. Clark, this basic conception was anticipated earlier by French modernism. For our feminists, queer theorists and writers interested in race or economic inequality, the goal of art should be to critique our institutions. Often they make a distinction between the good art, which is politically critical, and the merely complacent art which is not. The Venetian Republic had plenty of problems, but no significant art was ever devoted to criticizing its institutions. In this strict patriarchy, there was no art supporting feminist protest; and though gay people had no rights, there was no art devoted to critiquing their oppression.
While it’s easy to understand why the Venetian Republic supported art that validated its values, why does the United States exhibit work that is critical? Often the complaint is that our society doesn’t life up to its ideals. And for us the Enlightenment ideal of the importance of self-criticality remains important. Politically critical art may help the culture change for the better. Recently, for example, when feminists and Black artists complained that they were unfairly excluded the art world, the situation improved.
Some societies are officially monocultural, while others aspire to be multicultural. The Venetian Republic was a Catholic state ruled by White men selected from its small group of nobles. The doge was chosen from this elite. Venice was a patriarchal Catholic republic which allowed some residents from other Italian city states and European nations, including Jews. Venice had to adjudicate conflicts within the ruling class, and control political activity by the other citizens, the vast majority excluded from its nobility. Because America is a multicultural society, it has to deal conflicts between its very diverse interest groups, which include various races and religious groups.
In monocultural Venice art celebrated the Venetian Republic and its religion. The relics of Saint Mark housed under the high altar of San Marco, with their story depicted in some of the mosaics, marked that connection. Venice was a theocratic society. The styles of great Venetian painters were very various, and the development of their tradition dramatic. But we can compare the ways that Giovanni Bellini, Titian and Tiepolo depicted Catholic subjects such as God the Father, the Holy Virgin, and the saints knowing that these diverse painters all accepted the same basic religious beliefs. In Venice the Greeks also had their church, and the Jews, several synagogues. But they were communities of outsiders, not citizens, and so they were artistically set apart.
Because there were within Venetian Catholicism real theological disputes, with frequent conflicts with the Papacy, Venice needed a well developed spy system. And of course in a Republic with vast economic inequalities, there were class struggles. The central goal of the elaborate system for selecting doges was to eliminate strife that might jeopardize the continuing existence of the Republic. While a few Venetians were inspired by the Protestants, they had no real effect on that Republic. Venice traded extensively with the Islamic world. And so fine carpets often appear in paintings, and the architecture was influenced by Islamic models. Because the Venetians were traders, they needed to know something about the Islamic world. But there was no serious interest in understanding the values of that exotic culture. Venice had no art museums.
Our multicultural society has two kinds of art. There is the work which claims to manifest a universal aesthetic. We find it in museums of world art history. The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Africa, China, India and Europe alongside every other visual culture. And some contemporary work has the same goal. When I started writing, around 1980, for me the most important theorists were Ernst Gombrich, for old master art, and Clement Greenberg, who discussed contemporary work. They took it for granted that a universal, secular aesthetic was the basis for art history. How the art world has changed since then! Now the art of identity politics is very important. A great deal of contemporary art deals with gender, place of national origin, and race in these terms. In our society, each such group has to assert its identity if it is to avoid being marginalized. And this means that the politics of art have become complicated.
Reading the history of Venice in standard accounts like William Bouwsma’s Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation, one learns to think of a nation as an organism, which can prosper and survive only if it is successful at adapting to changing conditions. Aided by its unique geographic site on the lagoon, Venice had stable enough institutions to last a millennium. (Admittedly, several times the Republic did come close to collapsing.) The Venetian Republic had to achieve unity and resolution of conflicts in a relatively homogeneous society. The art was one source of social unity, and the rituals associated with the churches often brought people together.
The United States has to do something more difficult: It needs to find a source of unity for a heterogeneous culture. As the Civil War and our present conflicts demonstrate, it’s not self evident that the American Republic will be as long lived as Venice. And it’s not obvious that contemporary art will provide a basis for unity. Often it’s optimistically said that learning about art is a way of appreciating a foreign culture. But, also, the art may reveal how unlike us they are. And we may well then decide that their culture is not appealing.
The start of this essay contrasted the philosopher’s concern for a general definition of art with the art historian’s focus on art as cultural expression. Ironically, then, it’s the philosopher Hegel who provided this conception of art as cultural expression. What happens to art from a monocultural society like the Venetian Republic when it is displayed in the museums of a multicultural culture like the United States? Here is an interesting philosophical problem discussed in detail elsewhere in my account of museum skepticism’. The price of removing art from its original setting to this institution is to remove its function as ritual and transform it into an artwork. This is how African masks, Hindu sculptures and Venetian Catholic paintings lose their religious functions and become aesthetically pleasing in the public art museum. There certainly were occasional anticipations of our museums in Venice. There is a real aesthetic dimension of the Catholic art which co-existed alongside with its political and sacred functions. But only in our secular culture are these sacred paintings viewed in museums and studied by art historians.
Note:
Sources include Donatella Calabi, Venice and Its Jews. 500 Years Since the Founding of the Ghetto (2017); Venice and the Islamic World. 828-1797 (2006); my Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (2006).
