essay about fine arts

Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art.  It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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Essay on Fine Arts

Students are often asked to write an essay on Fine Arts in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Fine Arts

What are fine arts.

Fine arts are creative art forms that people enjoy for their beauty and emotional power. These include painting, sculpture, music, dance, and theater. Artists use their imagination to make works that can make us feel happy, sad, or excited.

Painting and Sculpture

Painting involves using brushes to put colors on a surface like canvas. Sculpture is about shaping materials like clay or metal to form figures or objects. Both can tell stories or show nature and people.

Music and Dance

Music is the art of making sounds that are pleasing to hear. Dance is moving your body to music. Both can express feelings without words.

Theater is when actors perform a story on stage. It combines speech, acting, and sometimes music. Theater can make us think and feel different emotions.

Importance of Fine Arts

250 words essay on fine arts, what are fine arts.

Fine arts are forms of art that people create mainly for their beauty or emotional power. They include activities like painting, sculpture, music, dance, and theater. When you think of fine arts, imagine a beautiful painting hanging in a museum or a graceful ballet performance on stage.

Types of Fine Arts

There are many kinds of fine arts. Painters use brushes and colors to put their ideas on canvas. Sculptors mold materials like clay or carve stone to make shapes and figures. Musicians play instruments or sing to make melodies. Dancers move their bodies in special ways to tell stories without words. Actors perform in plays and movies, bringing characters to life.

Why Fine Arts Matter

Fine arts are important because they help us express our feelings and thoughts. They can make us feel happy, sad, excited, or calm. When artists create, they share a part of themselves with the world. People can look at a piece of art and see something new each time. Fine arts also teach us about different cultures and histories.

Learning Fine Arts

Many schools teach fine arts. Students can learn to draw, play an instrument, or act in a play. Learning about fine arts helps students to think creatively and solve problems. It also helps them to work well with others and feel confident.

Fine arts are a special way to share beauty and emotions. They are a way for people to connect with each other and understand the world better.

500 Words Essay on Fine Arts

There are many kinds of fine arts. Paintings are artworks made with colors on surfaces like paper or canvas. Sculptures are three-dimensional pieces made from materials like stone, metal, or wood. Music is the art of making sounds that are nice to listen to. Dance is when people move their bodies in a way that is both beautiful and tells a story. Theater is when actors play out stories on stage for an audience.

The Importance of Fine Arts

Fine arts are important for many reasons. They help us express our feelings and ideas. When we look at a painting or listen to music, it can make us feel happy, sad, excited, or calm. Fine arts also teach us about different cultures and histories. For example, by looking at old paintings, we can learn about how people lived a long time ago.

Artists and Their Work

Artists spend a lot of time making their art. Some famous artists are Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the Mona Lisa, and Beethoven, who composed beautiful music. Artists can become famous because their work is very good or very different from what other people are making.

Fine Arts in Our Lives

Fine arts are all around us. We see them in museums, in books, and on TV. Sometimes we see sculptures in parks or hear music at a concert. Fine arts make our world a more beautiful place to live in.

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Crafts and Fine Arts. Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Works cited.

Nowadays the majority of people are totally unable to explain the difference between the so called crafts and fine arts. Therefore, in order to be able to do this one may provide with examples of works and their comparative analysis that might be assigned to the categories of the interest. Moreover, to explain the vaguely difference between them, one may give the example of the art work that may be assigned to the both categories: either to the crafts or to the fine art.

It is really hard to define what kind of art should be described as a craft and a fine art; as such definitions can not satisfy everyone and might even injure some artist’s feelings. It is even possible to spend hours on the debate over this issue and not to achieve any particular results. But, what might be noted here is that there exist some elements and rules associated with certain classical idea about the fine arts, like painting or sculpture, that are actually determining them.

There were made a couple attempts to distinguish and define those two terms. One may refer to the academic and the utilitarian way of the explanation. Those students, who graduate from the universities with a fine arts degree are not likely to study the crafts discipline, therefore they do not consider the crafts work as a fine, high level art. There is also a scholar point of view which expresses the Elliot W. Eisner’s and Michael D. Day’s idea that “art is not made to sale, you do not create art for money. Art is at a higher level, it makes a statement, and it has feeling and emotion; crafts are more functional and less academic in theories.”

Any useful or decorative hand made object might be considered as a craft work, for example a mug, teapot or vase, embellished by the artist with his or her own hands. It should be pointed out that the “craft work is skilled work: any kind of craft must involve the application of a technique … [it] implies the application of human intelligence…” (Eisner, Day, 2004).

And here, one is drawn to the point, when the difference between the crafts and the fine arts can be explained. The craftsman’s work, like the mug, teapot or vase must be capable of holding tea, any liquid or flowers. But the fine arts’ work does not usually have any utilitarian function. It might be also a tea cup, but, for example of the Chinese dynasty Min period, thus it would be guarded and of course, no one would be aloud to drink tea from it.

As for the crafts objects, they “tend to exhibit their prettiness around a purpose external to the object itself. To this extent, the crafts aren’t arts… (Sayre, 2003). If refer to the famous English philosopher Emanuel Kant in the definition of the fine arts, then it appears that “they appeal purely at the level of the imagination and aren’t good for any practical utility, except the cultivation of the human spirit” (Kant, cited from Eisner, Day, 2004).

If one would like to represent the example of the art object that would feat the definition of both: the crafts and the fine arts, then the hand made glass flowers would perform this role quite well. They can be considered the fine arts work as they create the aesthetic and admiration feeling. Nevertheless, they might be regarded as the crafts work as they are frequently used in everyday life for the decoration of common people’s houses.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Michael D. Day, eds. Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.

Sayre, Henry M. A World of Art. Revised 4th ed. New York, NY: Prentice – Hall, 2003.

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Art Essay Examples

Art Essay Examples to Get You Inspired - Top 10 Samples

Published on: May 4, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 30, 2024

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Are you struggling to come up with ideas for your art essay? Or are you looking for examples to help guide you in the right direction? 

Look no further, as we have got you covered!

In this blog, we provide a range of art writing examples that cover different art forms, time periods, and themes. Whether you're interested in the classics or contemporary art, we have something for everyone. These examples offer insight into how to structure your essay, analyze art pieces, and write compelling arguments.

So, let's explore our collection of art essay examples and take the first step toward becoming a better art writer!

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Good Art Essay Examples

In the following section, we will examine a selection of art essay examples that are inspiring for various academic levels.

College Art Essay Examples

Let’s take a look at college art essay examples below:  

The Intersection of Art and Politics: An Analysis of Picasso's Guernica

The Role of Nature in American Art: A Comparative Study

University Art Essay Examples

University-level art essay assignments often differ in length and complexity. Here are two examples:

Gender and Identity in Contemporary Art: A Comparative Study

Art and Activism: The Role of Street Art in Political Movements

A Level Art Essay Examples

Below are some art paper examples A level. Check out: 

The Use Of Color In Wassily Kandinsky's Composition Viii

The Influence of African Art on Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'avignon

A Level Fine Art Essay Examples

If you're a student of fine arts, these A-level fine arts examples can serve as inspiration for your own work.

The Use Of Texture In Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night

Exploring Identity Through Portraiture: A Comparative Study

Art Essay Examples IELTS 

The Impact of Art on Mental Health

The Effects of Technology on Art And Creativity

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

AP Art Essay Examples

A Comparison of Neoclassical and Romantic Art

An Examination Of The Effects Of Globalization On Contemporary Art

Types of Art Essay with Examples

Art essays can be categorized into different types. Let's take a brief look at these types with examples:

Art Criticism Essay : A critical essay analyzing and evaluating an artwork, its elements, and its meaning.

The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali: A Critical Analysis

Art History Essay: A comprehensive essay that examines the historical context, development, and significance of an artwork or art movement.

The Renaissance: A Rebirth of Artistic Expression

Exhibition Review: A review of an art exhibition that evaluates the quality and significance of the artwork on display.

A Review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Exhibition

Contemporary Art Essay: An essay that explores and analyzes contemporary art and its cultural and social context.

The Intersection of Technology and Art in Contemporary Society

Modern Art Essay: An essay that examines modern art and its significance in the development of modernism.

Cubism and its Influence on Modern Art [insert pdf]

Art Theory Essay: An essay that analyzes and critiques various theories and approaches to art.

Feminist Art Theory: A Critical Analysis of its Impact on Contemporary Art [insert pdf]

Additional Art Essay Example

Let’s take a brief look at some added art essay samples:

Artwork Essay Example

Artist Essay Example

Advanced Higher Art Essay Example

Common Art Essay Prompts

Here are some common art essay topics that you may encounter during your coursework:

• Describe a piece of artwork that has inspired you.
• A comparative analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's David.
• Analyze the cultural significance of a particular art movement.
• Discuss the relationship between art and politics.
• Compare and contrast two works of art from different time periods or cultures.
• The representation of identity in art
• The Evolution of Artists' Paintings:
• From Traditional to Contemporary Art
• The representation of identity in Frida Kahlo's self-portraits.
• The significance of oil on canvas in the history of art.
• The significance of the Mona Lisa in the Italian Renaissance

Art Essay Topics IELTS

Here are some art essay topics for IELTS students. Take a look: 

• The value of art education.
• The role of museums in preserving art and culture.
• The impact of globalization on contemporary art.
• The influence of technology on art and artists.
• The significance of public art in urban environments.

Tips For Writing a Successful Art Essay

Here are some tips for writing a stand-out art essay:

• Develop a clear thesis statement that guides your essay: Your thesis statement should clearly and concisely state the main argument of your essay.
• Conduct thorough research and analysis of the artwork you are writing about : This includes examining the visual elements of the artwork, researching the artist, and considering the historical significance.
• Use formal and precise language to discuss the artwork: Avoid using colloquial language and instead focus on using formal language to describe the artwork.
• Include specific examples from the artwork to support your arguments: Use specific details from the artwork to back up your analysis.
• Avoid personal bias and subjective language: Your essay should be objective and avoid using personal opinions or subjective language.
• Consider the historical and cultural context of the artwork: Analyze the artwork in the context of the time period and cultural context in which they were created.
• Edit and proofread your essay carefully before submitting it: Ensure your essay is well-organized, coherent, and free of grammatical errors and typos.
• Use proper citation format when referencing sources: Follow the appropriate citation style guidelines and give credit to all sources used in your essay.
• Be concise and focused in your writing: Stick to your main thesis statement and avoid going off-topic or including irrelevant information.
• Read your essay aloud to ensure clarity and coherence: Reading your essay out loud can help you identify inconsistencies or any other mistakes.

The Bottom Line!

We hope that the art essay examples we've explored have provided you with inspiration for your own essay. Art offers endless possibilities for analysis, and your essay is a chance to showcase your unique opinions.

Use these examples as a guide to craft an essay that reflects your personality while demonstrating your knowledge of the subject.

Short on time? Let CollegeEssay.org help you! All you have to do is to ask our experts, " write college essay for me " and they'll help you secure top grades in college.

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By Will Fenstermaker

June 14, 2017

There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon, Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France, for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning , then the editor of ARTnews , who ran “The American Action Painters” in December, 1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of “action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read. Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism, Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle. “What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation . In 1955, The Partisan Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness, and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters, such as Frank Stella , Helen Frankenthaler , and Kenneth Noland, had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell. (As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence of formalist discourse.

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time.

Barbara Rose

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for. The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond abstract expressionism.

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many of the most cherished premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism, which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights, women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The Partisan Review , which birthed formalism, had by then distanced itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body, was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam. Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to the September 1970 issue of Artforum , written by Philip Leider, ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical, patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of reactionary art , why would the women picket it? Why not? Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin

While Artforum , in its early history, had established a reputation as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a textbook example of institutional critique.

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is. But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review, Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact, took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed, near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized European genius.

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can scan all art.”

RELATED: From Cuba With Love: Artist Bill Claps on the Island’s DIY Art Scene

Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a (perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black artists for centuries.

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a Noun Vs. Verb

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production became more and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a major source for European and Euro-American exotic interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects of modern life.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine , Anna Chave analyzes how Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in 1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde…. What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures…. But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system: when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful, sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk. My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine. Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame government less because it has long ago outgrown its human dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary humanity and without respect for the common element of human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation . However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two, which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy. After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this “pluralism.”

RELATED: What Was the Pictures Generation?

Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice, especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the “broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it, transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art, whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it applied to everything, so that there was room for deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here , here , here (paywall), and here . Also relevant are reviews of the 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta Smith , Peter Schjeldahl , and Martha Schwendener .

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The 10 Essays That Changed Art Criticism Forever

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Is Photography Among the Fine Arts?

By: Zofia Mowle Fine art is a form of visual art, intended to be appreciated entirely for its imaginative and visionary content. Photography has developed throughout the course of many years, and there has definitely been a shift in the way we appreciate it as an art form. The field of photography has expanded significantly and in today’s society anything that has artistic intent behind it, whether that be abstract, portrait or landscape photography, will be considered fine art. The discussion of whether or not photography should be considered a ‘fine art’ is a topic that has been debated for hundreds of years. There are such strong arguments for both sides, and it’s important to recognise all these factors when forming an opinion. 

Joseph Pennell is an American illustrator and author, who spent the majority of his life studying the traditional means of architectural drawings in Europe. During his time abroad he established an international reputation for himself as someone of high regard within the fine art world. Joseph Pennell had an extreme bias and unfavourable opinion towards photography. In 1897, Pennell wrote an excerpt titled ‘Is Photography Among the Fine Arts?’ In this excerpt he provided an array of reasons as to why photography is not among the fine arts. There’s a strong bias against photography, which is supported within the text. Pennell discusses the lack of skill required with photography, as it’s “merely mechanical and [does] not require the [same level of] training that art does.” [1]  To continue, Pennell argued that photography shouldn’t be considered a fine art as it’s too easy. He compared photography to a simple hobby, saying that, “photography is amusement and relaxation.” [2] Traditional painting and photography are two completely different forms of art. Therefore, it’s difficult to truly compare them when debating the topic of what makes something ‘fine art.’ Throughout the reading he continually expresses his belief that artists are more qualified and trained than photographers, and therefore are superior. He judges photographers and ridicules them, saying what a farce it is that “Titian, Velasquex and Rembrandt actually [studied].” [3] The art of photography is to capture our surroundings with a realistic approach. Unlike with paintings, cameras have the ability to see everything and capture specific moments of time, which may go unnoticed within our everyday lives. They are essentially machines that have the capability to produce a documentary fact. Similarly to how there are machines to create carpets and machines to produce shirts, the camera is a machine that was invented to generate pictures. For this reason, Pennell questions why photography is considered an art form at all. If photography is such an automated process dependent on machinery and chemicals, then why is it art? “The man who sells margarine for butter, and chalk and water for milk, does much the same, and renders himself liable to legal prosecution by doing it.” [4]  It’s clear from Joseph Pennell’s excerpt that photography is not a form of ‘fine art.’ Fine art usually involves a story and is intended to have a purpose that evokes some sort of emotion from the viewer. I agree with Pennell that it’s not possible just to take a beautifully composed picture and call it fine art. In order for an image to be considered fine art it must be designed with the intention of resonating with the viewer and compel the audience to perceive the subject matter differently. 

In contradiction to Joseph Pennell’s excerpt, Paul L. Anderson wrote a book titled ‘The Fine Art of Photography.” This book was interesting as the author went against everything previously mentioned and he discussed the array of reasons as to why photography should be considered among the fine arts. Paul L. Anderson was an American photographer and author, who wrote many books on the art of photography. Anderson considers photography a unique form of graphic art. In his book he conveys the importance of photography as an art form, and how it’s a collaborative process where “scientific knowledge and artistic feeling go hand-in-hand to the production of a fine result.” [5] He defines fine art as “any medium of expression which permits one person to convey to another an abstract idea of lofty character, to arouse in another a lofty emotion.” [6] Anderson highlights an important factor that must be established, which is to draw the line between fine art and craftsmanship. He uses Michelangelo’s David as a clear example of something that is considered fine art, whereas a typical Indian man’s tobacconist sign as something that is not. However, it’s not possible to say just where these two expressions merge. Anderson argues that, “the Indian may carry a glimmering of an abstract, and to that extent may possess some of the elements of fine art.” [7] The question of whether or not photography is among the fine arts varies significantly from person to person. Anderson believes that for photography to be considered a true art form, and not a craft, the photographer must create an image with a specific vision. The artist must use the camera as a medium for creative expression with a goal of creating something that expresses an idea, message and emotion. 

E. Thiesson created a Daguerreotype titled Native Woman of Sofala, 1845. In my opinion, this photograph is an exquisite example of fine art. It’s a profile portrait of an African woman seated on a wooden chair. The composition is well-balanced and the figure is situated in the center of the frame. It’s a raw and organic image that provokes a multitude of emotion within the viewer. Her expression resembles something of contemplation -she appears to be deep in thought and it forces us, as the viewer, to ask questions. Her posture is slouched, she does not wear any makeup, her hair is natural and she wears a kaba skirt, which is a traditional African skirt made from kiswah. Her breasts are left uncovered, but not in a sexualised way. She’s a traditional African woman and her appearance represents her culture. One of the essential purposes of photography is communication. This image communicates heritage, it teaches us about ethnicities and cultures that differ from our own. We use photography as a form of documentation and it’s used for educational purposes. Pennell would argue that this photograph isn’t an example of fine art, as it’s simply just a woman sitting on a chair. In his reading he makes direct comparisons between photography and painting, emphasising that one is significantly more impressive than the other. What’s better, a nude photograph or a nude painting? Pennell believes that getting a model to pose naked for a photograph puts other artists like Botticelli to shame, for he “sees what he has been taught to like by reading books on painting; which he does not understand and which teaches nothing for him.” [8] Despite this, in my opinion, Thiesson’s photograph is a true example of fine art photography. It’s evident that the artist took the time to carefully create the composition, from the framing of the image to the details of the woman -her attire, posture, expression, etc. Dona Schwartz, an author and professor of journalism, wrote an article on the social construct of photography. In her article she argues that photography draws upon “ethnographic research comparing the activities of the camera club and fine art photography.” [9] This comparison translates to Thiesson’s photograph, as it’s a collaboration between ethnographic photography and fine art. 

It’s interesting to debate the topic of what is and what isn’t considered to be ‘fine art.’ To this day, photographs remain to have less monetary value than paintings and sculpture. In my opinion, both mediums fulfil different tasks -a photographer captures a single moment, a snapshot of life, and a painter makes a picture. Paintings have the ability to illustrate deeper meanings that photographers are either unable to, or struggle to, encapsulate within their work. However, in my opinion, this doesn’t take away from what is considered ‘fine art.’ I believe that photography is among the fine arts, as fine art photography requires a similar level of precision and specific vision that other fine art mediums, such as painting and sculpture, require. Fine art photographs are created just as carefully as paintings, and therefore it’s unjust to classify photography, as a whole, as a medium that is unworthy being considered fine art. 

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Time Essay: The Fine Art of Putting Things Off

“Never put off till tomorrow,” exhorted Lord Chesterfield in 1749, “what you can do today.” That the elegant earl never got around to marrying his son’s mother and had a bad habit of keeping worthies like Dr. Johnson cooling their heels for hours in an anteroom attests to the fact that even the most well-intentioned men have been postponers ever. Quintus Fabius Maximus, one of the great Roman generals, was dubbed “Cunctator ” (Delayer) for putting off battle until the last possible vinum break. Moses pleaded a speech defect to rationalize his reluctance to deliver Jehovah’s edicts to Pharaoh. Hamlet, of course, raised procrastination to an art form.

The world is probably about evenly divided between delayers and do-it-nowers. There are those who prepare their income taxes in February, prepay mortgages and serve precisely planned dinners at an ungodly 6:30 p.m. The other half dine happily on leftovers at 9 or 10, misplace bills and file for an extension of the income tax deadline. They seldom pay credit-card bills until the apocalyptic voice of Diners threatens doom from Denver. They postpone, as Faustian encounters, visits to barbershop, dentist or doctor.

Yet for all the trouble procrastination may incur, delay can often inspire and revive a creative soul. Jean Kerr, author of many successful novels and plays, says that she reads every soup-can and jamjar label in her kitchen before settling down to her typewriter. Many a writer focuses on almost anything but his task—for example, on the Coast and Geodetic Survey of Maine’s Frenchman Bay and Bar Harbor, stimulating his imagination with names like Googins Ledge, Blunts Pond, Hio Hill and Burnt Porcupine, Long Porcupine, Sheep Porcupine and Bald Porcupine islands.

From Cunctator’s day until this century, the art of postponement had been virtually a monopoly of the military (“Hurry up and wait”), diplomacy and the law. In former times, a British proconsul faced with a native uprising could comfortably ruminate about the situation with Singapore Sling in hand. Blessedly, he had no nattering Telex to order in machine guns and fresh troops. A U.S. general as late as World War II could agree with his enemy counterpart to take a sporting day off, loot the villagers’ chickens and wine and go back to battle a day later. Lawyers are among the world’s most addicted postponers. According to Frank Nathan, a nonpost-poning Beverly Hills insurance salesman, “The number of attorneys who die without a will is amazing.”

Even where there is no will, there is a way. There is a difference, of course, between chronic procrastination and purposeful postponement, particularly in the higher echelons of business. Corporate dynamics encourage the caution that breeds delay, says Richard Manderbach, Bank of America group vice president. He notes that speedy action can be embarrassing or extremely costly. The data explosion fortifies those seeking excuses for inaction—another report to be read, another authority to be consulted. “There is always,” says Manderbach, “a delicate edge between having enough information and too much.”

His point is well taken. Bureaucratization, which flourished amid the growing burdens of government and the greater complexity of society, was designed to smother policymakers in blankets of legalism, compromise and reappraisal—and thereby prevent hasty decisions from being made. The centralization of government that led to Watergate has spread to economic institutions and beyond, making procrastination a worldwide way of life. Many languages are studded with phrases that refer to putting things off—from the Spanish mañana to the Arabic bukra fil mishmish (literally “tomorrow in apricots,” more loosely “leave it for the soft spring weather when the apricots are blooming”).

Academe also takes high honors in procrastination. Bernard Sklar, a University of Southern California sociologist who churns out three to five pages of writing a day, admits that “many of my friends go through agonies when they face a blank page. There are all sorts of rationalizations: the pressure of teaching, responsibilities at home, checking out the latest book, looking up another footnote.”

Psychologists maintain that the most assiduous procrastinators are women, though many psychologists are (at $50-plus an hour) pretty good delayers themselves. Dr. Ralph Greenson, a U.C.L.A. professor of clinical psychiatry (and Marilyn Monroe’s onetime shrink), takes a fairly gentle view of procrastination. “To many people,” he says, “doing something, confronting, is the moment of truth. All frightened people will then avoid the moment of truth entirely, or evade or postpone it until the last possible moment.” To Georgia State Psychologist Joen Pagan, however, procrastination may be a kind of subliminal way of sorting the important from the trivial. “When I drag my feet, there’s usually some reason,” says Fagan. “I feel it, but I don’t yet know the real reason.”

In fact, there is a long and honorable history of procrastination to suggest that many ideas and decisions may well improve if postponed. It is something of a truism that to put off making a decision is itself a decision. The parliamentary process is essentially a system of delay and deliberation. So, for that matter, is the creation of a great painting, or an entree, or a book, or a building like Blenheim Palace, which took the Duke of Marlborough’s architects and laborers 15 years to construct. In the process, the design can mellow and marinate. Indeed, hurry can be the assassin of elegance. As T.H. White, author of Sword in the Stone, once wrote, time “is not meant to be devoured in an hour or a day, but to be consumed delicately and gradually and without haste.” In other words, pace Lord Chesterfield, what you don’t necessarily have to do today, by all means put Off until tomorrow.

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On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827)

Thomas De Quincey’s essay “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts” was first published in 1827 in  Blackwood’s Magazine . It is a satirical and fictional account of an address made to a gentleman’s club focused on murder’s aesthetic value. According to its Wikipedia page , the essay was “enthusiastically received,” causing De Quincey to write numerous sequels.

In the essay, De Quincey references a number of historical personages and even bases one of the murders he describes on a real series of homicides committed by John Williams in 1811 in Ratcliffe Highway, London.

Throughout the essay, De Quincey argues that there he is currently living in a great time for murders, as they are so plenty and, for the most part, masterful works of art. He also explains the difference between assassinations (which must always at least be attempted against great philosophers) and murder, as well as what sort of victims are worthy subjects of the murderous art.

People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed- a knife- a purse- and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.

He argues that it is morally acceptable to aesthetically appreciate an artful murder because there is nothing that the spectator or interested person can do- we can’t fix a murder or bring the victim back to life, so De Quincey argues that there is no need for virtue. He says we should instead “make the best of a bad matter” and “treat it (the murder) aesthetically.” By doing this, we exercise our “taste” and our understanding of the fine arts rather than our morality and virtue. It’s more pleasing for everyone involved to approach a murder aesthetically rather than morally.

In his “great gallery of murder,” there are a number of examples in which the murder was committed (and in some cases, almost committed) with the motive of robbery. This sort of thinking bleeds into his description of what constitutes an ideal murder victim. Take, for example, his description of Hobbes as a potential subject:

Hobbes, but why, or on what principle, I never could understand, was not murdered. This was a capital oversight of the professional men in the seventeenth century; because in every light he was a fine subject for murder, except, indeed, that he was lean and skinny, for I can prove that he had money, and (what is very funny,) he had no right to make the least resistance…

Age is also a vital aspect of choosing a good murder victim: “how little would be gained to the cause of good taste by murdering an old, arid, and adults metaphysician.” He later also adds that the victim should be “good” so that it it can create pity and fear in the public (for example, if the victim was a robber or was also a murderer, the public wouldn’t care as much for him or her).

He also describes the challenges that may arise for the murderer when dealing with the victim:

Awkward disturbances will arise; people will not submit to have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and whilst the portrait painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his subject, the artist, in our line, is generally embarrassed by too much animation. At the same time, however disagreeable to the artist, this tendency in murder to excite and irritate the subject, is certainly one of its advantages to the world in general, which we ought not to overlook, since it favors the development of latent talent… the extraordinary leaps which people will take under the influence of fear.

In other words, murder helps the victim to experience their greatest self. Unknown strength and speed suddenly appear in their bodies as they try to escape their fate. Therefore, the murderer, according to De Quincey, provides society with a great benefit.

His description of newspaper readers and public consumption for murder is helpful to remember:

I should say a few words about the principles of murder, not with a view to regulate your practice, but your judgment: as to old women, and the mob of newspaper readers, they are pleased with anything, provided it is bloody enough. But the mind of sensibility requires something more.

Finally, De Quincey takes on the role of an “amateur” murderer/artist who is desirous of improving his craft and is humble regarding his present skills.

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Caitlin Duffy

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19th Century , Victorian List

19th century , aesthetic , art , assassination , capital , capitalism , consumer culture , crime , death , fear , gore , gothic , moral , murder , public , value , victim , victorian

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