Regularity and Dexterity

The English word ‘art’, like the German ‘Kunst’, can still be used in various senses, each of which includes traces of all the others. While ‘art’ can mean ‘any kind of skill’, it may also refer, slightly more narrowly, only to the exercise of such a skill. ‘Art’ can, moreover, denote the (more or less finished) product of skilful action, and, finally, it has now come to stand specifically for the more recent concept of ‘fine art’, the manifestations of which, although representing relatively free and open forms of play, are typically shown in museums and art galleries or otherwise marked as distinct from ordinary experience and goal-directed work. Throughout the nineteenth century, all of these meanings were still commonly used alongside each other, even though ‘fine art’ was increasingly taken to be informed by an idea of the aesthetic, closely allied with the notion of genius, that allegedly distinguished it from art as (‘mere’) technical skill. Yet, even without the specifically ‘fine’ aspect, to which I will return, the task of defining ‘art’ posed a considerable challenge to critics, as the respective article in the ninth (or scholars’) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica indicates. ‘Art, whether used of all arts at once or of one at a time,’ the author points out, ‘is a name not only for the power of doing something, but for the exercise of the power; and not only for the exercise of the power, but for the rules according to which it is exercised; and not only for the rules, but for the result’ (EB 636).

As this shows, the meaning of art was taken to stretch across a continuum that could encompass the (individual) ability to ‘do something’ as well as the (social) ‘rules’ that enable and constrain it and the process of performing an action as well as its ‘result’. ‘Painting, for instance, is an art, and the idea includes not only the power to paint, but the act of painting; and not only the act, but the laws for performing the act rightly; and not only all these, but the material consequences of the act or the thing painted’ (EB 636).