American Academy of Arts & Sciences

American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics

Author(s): M. H. Abrams
Source: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 38, No. 6 (Mar., 1985), pp.
8-33
Published by: American Academy of Arts & Sciences
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Stated Meeting Report
Art-as-Such: The Sociology

of Modern Aesthetics
M. H. Abrams
For the two centuries

last the professional
of art, and more recently the prac
philosophy
tical criticism of the various arts, has been
on a theory which, for easy reference,
grounded
I shall call "art-as-such." This theory uses a very
distinctive terminology to make the following
claims:
as a term interchangeable
(1) "Art" is used
with "the fine arts," which consist primarily of
five arts: poetry (or literature), painting, sculp
ture, music, and architecture. The considera
tion of
these essentially related products
constitutes an area of inquiry which is sui generis.
a work of art is its status
(2) What defines
as an object to be "contemplated," and contem
that is, attended to "as
plated "disinterestedly"?
such," for its own sake, without regard to the
interests or the possessiveness or the
personal
desires of the perceiver, and without reference
to its truth or its utility or its morality. A work
of art may or may not be true to the world or
serve practical ends or have moral effects, but
such considerations are held to be supervenient
upon (or in some views, destructive of) the

?
defining experience that
is, the absorbed and
disinterested contemplation of the product for
itself, simply as a work of art.
art is accordingly described
(3) A work of
as an object that is self-sufficient, autonomous,
independent. It is asserted to be an end in it
self, not a means to an external end, and its
artistic value is said to be intrinsic, not extrin
sic, to its own being. The work, in other words,
is conceived as an entity that exists simply in
order to be looked at or read or listened to with
an absorbed, exclusive, and disinterested at
tention.
One can such theories by two terse
illustrate
but comprehensive statements. One is by T E.
Hulme, whose views had an important forma
tive influence on T. S. Eliot and the American
New Criticism that began about 1930. "Con
templation," Hulme says, is "a detached interest."
The object of aesthetic contemplation is

something framed apart by itself and regard
ed without memory or expectation, simply
as as end not means, as individu
being itself,
al not universal.
The other is a felicitous summation by Iris

Murdoch as well as a
novelist
(a practicing
in her Romanes Lecture on art
philosopher)
in 1976:
Good art
[provides the] clearest experience of
something grasped as separate and precious
and beneficial and held quietly and unpos
in the attention.
sessively
Such formulations are usually presented by

aesthetic philosophers and critics as universal
and timeless truths about works of art, and we
tend to think of the history of art theory as a
sustained movement toward the triumphant dis
covery of these truths, sidetracked and delayed
by various false leads. The historical facts,
however, make this view a dubious one. For
more than two thousand years after the philo
consideration of one or another of the
sophical
arts was inaugurated by Plato and Aristotle,
theorists and critics did not even class together
the diverse products that we now identify as "the
fine arts." Instead, one or another
they grouped
of these arts with mathematics or with the
natural sciences or with a practical art such as
or no
agriculture shoemaking. They proposed
terms for specifying a distinctive or essential
artistic property, nor for talking about works
of art in a way that undertook to be distinctive
for that class and exclusive of all other human
artifacts. Instead, they discussed one of the arts
at a time; and when they paralleled that art to
another of what we now call "the fine arts"?
poetry to painting?it was for limit
especially
ed comparative purposes, and with reference
only to selected features. And during those two
millennia, it occurred to no thinker to assert
that a product of even one of the human arts
exists in order to be contemplated disinterest
own sake, without reference to
edly, for its
or ef
things, events, human beings, purposes,
fects outside its sufficient and autonomous self.
The fact is that the theory and
historical
vocabulary of art-as-such was introduced, quite
only some two or three centuries ago
abruptly,
into what had hitherto been a relatively con
tinuous development of the traditional views
and terminology that philosophers and critics
had inherited from Greek and Roman antiq
uity. And in retrospect, it becomes clear that
the revolution effected in the theory of art in
volved a replacement of the implicit understruc
ture of traditional theory by a radically different
understructure.
Theorists of the various arts, from classical

Greece through most of the eighteenth centu
ry, whatever their divergencies, had assumed
the maker's stance toward a work of art, and
had analyzed its attributes in terms of a con

struction model. That is, they posited a poem
or any other work of art to be an opus, a thing
that is made according to a techne or ars, that
a
is, craft, each with its requisite skills for select
ing materials and shaping them into a work
designed to effect certain external ends, such
as achieving pleasure or instruction or emotion
al effects on an audience, as well as for adapt
ing the work to a particular social occasion or

function. It is clear that from the viewpoint of
this construction model, the patent differences
between the materials and practical skills of a
a a a or an
poet, painter, sculptor, musician,
architect would keep these diverse occupations
and products from being classified together in
any systematic fashion, and for other than limit
ed purposes. The critical undertaking, conse
quently, was to deal with a single art ?most
often, in classical time, poetry or a subclass such
as and the critical treatises were
tragedy;
at least as much to guide a poet in
designed
10
a kind of good poem as to
writing particular
a reader to judge whether, and in what
help
ways, the poem is good or bad. In this orienta
tion to the making of a poem, Aristotle's Poet
ics, whatever its important differences, is
congruent with the views of Horace, whose
enormously influential Ars Po?tica is explicitly
a how-to document; that is, it is a verse-letter
addressed to a novice instructing him how to
write poems that will appeal most widely and
enduringly to a readership. In
discriminating
this aspect of their treatises, both these writers
are at one with the rhetoricians and with Lon
ginus; and all of these thinkers together estab
lished the basic mode and operative terms for
dealing with the verbal, and later the plastic
and musical, arts that persisted, without radi
cal innovations, through the seventeenth
century.
In contrast, theories of art-as-such
sharp
tacitly presuppose, not

the maker's stance to his
work in process, but the perceiver's stance to
the finished product; and they formulate their
discussion not on a construction model, but on
a contemplation model. That is, they assume
that the paradigmatic situation, in defining and
analyzing art, is that in which a lone perceiver
confronts an isolated work, however it happened
to get made, and simply attends to the features
that it manifests to his exclusive attention.
What I want to do is to sketch the emergence
of the point of view and operative vocabulary
of art-as-such, and then to investigate some of
the attendant conditions, both social and in
tellectual, that may explain why, after so many
centuries of speculation, this radical innovation
appeared suddenly just when it did and why
it developed rapidly in just the way it took.
/.
The perceiver's stance and

the contemplation
model were not products of
late nineteenth
century aestheticism, but of the cen
eighteenth
tury. More precisely, they appeared at the end
of the first decade of the eighteenth century,
in the writings of Joseph Addison and of the
third Earl of Shaftesbury; only eighty years
11
later, in 1790, they had developed into the full
modern formulation of art-as-such in Im
manuel Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.
Let me stress what, for our enterprise, are
salient features of Kant's theory. Despite its
epoch-making importance for the philosophy
of art, there is hardly a single observation about
the nature and experience of an aesthetic ob
ject that Kant did not find in his eighteenth
century precursors, English and German, be
ginning with Addison and Shaftesbury In fact,
Kant does not even argue for, but simply ac
cepts, certain concepts, current, and de
already
votes himself to grounding and systematizing
these concepts by showing how the uniquely
distinctive aesthetic experience (what he calls
"the pure judgment of taste") is possible, as he
a ? can
puts it, priori that is, how it be account
ed for by reference to the faculties and their
operations that the mind brings to all its ex
ex
perience. And his theory relies squarely and
on the stance and the
clusively perceiver's
contemplation model. As Kant posits the situ
ation that he assumes to be paradigmatic for
the philosophy of aesthetics: a pure judgment
of taste "combines delight or aversion immedi
ately [i.e., without the intervention of "concepts"]
with the bare contemplation [Betrach
tung] of the object irrespective of its use or of
any end." Only after he has established this
frame of reference does Kant go on, in the sec
ond book of his Critique, to discuss what he calls
die sch?nen K?nste, or fine arts; his list of the
major arts is the one that had recently become,

and still remains, the standard one of poetry,
painting, sculpture, architecture, and music ?to

which he adds the other arts, prominent in his
time, of eloquence and landscape gardening.
In this second section of his treatise, Kant also
introduces the topic of the production of a work
of art. His aim, however, is precisely opposed
to traditional constructive theories, which un
dertook to establish the principles which an
by
artist deliberately selects and orders his materi
als in order to effect preconceived ends. Kant's
enterprise, on the contrary, is to explain how
the producing artist, despite such concepts and
12
intentions, nonetheless manages, however unin
a product
to achieve that meets the
tentionally,
criteria already established by reference to the
concept-free and end-independent encounter

between a
percipient and a ready-made aesthet
ic work.
In discussing the nature of the normative aes
thetic encounter, Kant encompasses all the key
concepts and terms that constitute the theory
of art-as-such in our own time. Crucially, the
percipient's aesthetic judgment is, he says, "dis
interested" or "a pure disinterested delight," in
the sense that it is "purely contemplative" (bloss
kontemplativ), hence "impartial"?that is, it is free
of any reference to the interests or acquisitive
ness or desires of the perceiver, and is indiffer
ent even to the reality of the thing that is
represented in the mode of art. The object con
templated, Kant says, "pleases for its own sake"
(f?r sich selbst), in strict independence from what

he calls the "external" ends of utility or of moral
ity. A "fine art," accordingly, is "intrinsically fi
nal, devoid of an end." In Kant's
[extrinsic]
overall view, a human work of art, no less than
a natural is to be regarded as
object, having
no end other than simply to exist, to be just
what it is for our disinterested aesthetic con
templation.
Aspects of Kant's theory were quickly adopt

ed and developed by a number of German
metaphysicians, including Schiller, Schelling,
Hegel, and Schopenhauer, and so entered the
mainstream of aesthetic philosophy. What needs
to be stressed is the rapidity and completeness
of this Copernican revolution in the theory of
art. In the course of a single century a great
variety of human products, from poetry to ar

chitecture, conspicuously diverse in their me
dia and required skills, as well as in the occasion
and social function of individual works within
each art ?products of arts which hitherto had
been grouped with diverse human crafts, or
?
even sciences came to constitute a of
system
"the fine arts"; that is, a single, essentially relat
ed, and unique class of products. The construc
tion model, which had treated each of the arts
as a procedure for selecting and adapting its
13
distinctive elements to preconceived ends and
uses, was replaced by the contemplation model,
which treated the products of all the fine arts
as ready-made things existing as objects
simply
of rapt attention. And the essential feature
predicated of the fine arts, setting them off from
all cognitive, practical, and moral was
pursuits,
that each work is to be experienced disinterest
edly, for its own sake, unalloyed by reference
to the world, or to human life or concerns, or
to any relations, ends, or values outside its all
sufficing self.
A conceptual revolution so sudden and dras
tic cannot be plausibly explained as an evolu
tion of the traditional ideas about the arts; the
orientation and terms of art-as-such,
operative
as I have pointed out, were
entirely alien to that
tradition. To account for the revolution we
must, I think, turn to external factors which
enforced, or at least fostered, the new way of
Let us this
thinking. pose question: Was there,
just preceding and during the eighteenth cen
tury, a radical alteration in the social conditions
and social uses of the diverse products that came
during that period to be grouped as the fine
arts ? changes both concurrent and correlative
with the conceptual changes I have outlined?
This is, broadly speaking, a question concern
ing the sociology of art; but whereas altering
social conditions have often been used to ex
plain changes in the subject matter, forms, and
styles of practicing artists, I shall instead ad
vert to social conditions in order to explain a
art ?
drastic change in the general theory of that
is, in the focal concepts by which the arts were
identified, classified, and systematically
analyzed.
//.
A conspicuous phenomenon in the seven

teenth and eighteenth centuries was the rapid
spread of a mode of life, hitherto limited to a
privileged few, that I shall label "connoisseur
ship." By this term Imean the devotion of part
of one's leisure to the study and enjoyment of
the products of an art for the interest and pleas
ure they afford. Since the attitude and theory
14
of art-as-such emerged in England and was de
veloped in Germany, I shall focus on the so
cial phenomenon of the spread of
connoisseurship in those two countries.
We can begin in the seventeenth century with
the introduction of two new terms from the
Italian into the English critical lexicon. The first
term was gusto, translated as "taste," and applied
in the metaphorical sense of a capacity to
respond to the beauty or harmonious order of
whether natural or artificial. This
objects,
was considered to be an innate
responsiveness
sensibility, inherited by individuals in various
degrees, yet capable of being trained so as to
constitute a socially desirable "good taste" or a
a polished, taste;
"polite" (that is, upper-class)
and even of being so informed by the acquired
knowledge of the "rules" of a particular art that
it becomes a taste" or "correct taste." This
"just
new term quickly became a staple in critical
discussion, where it obviously served to empha
size the perceiver's point of vantage to a finished
artifact. (Note that in 1790 Kant labeled the
normative aesthetic response by the deliberately
paradoxical phrase: "a pure judgment o? taste?)
The second, and related, word from the
Italian is "virtuoso." This was introduced into
the English vocabulary in 1622 by Henry
Peacham, in his book on the requisites of an
upper-class education that he entitled The Com
Gentleman. Men who are "skilled" in such
plete
antiquities as "statues, inscriptions, and coins,"
Peacham says, "are by the Italians termed vir
tuosi? In the course of the seventeenth century,
the term "virtuoso" came to be applied to a
mode of life increasingly engaged in by gen
tlemen of the leisure class who applied them
selves to one or both of two pursuits. One
was and developing a degree
pursuit collecting,
of expertise about, the curiosities of natural
history and the contrivances of contemporary
The other was and de
technology. collecting,
an informed taste for var
veloping appraising,
ious artifacts, which included an extraordinary
range of rarities and bric-a-brac, but most
prominently paintings and statuary. By the end
of the seventeenth century, the term "virtuoso"
15
had already become derogatory, largely because
of the devastating attacks by Restoration wits
against the pedantry and fondness for natural
and artificialoddities by the science virtuoso.
The life-style of the aristocratic art virtuoso
nonetheless continued to flourish and expand
in the eighteenth century, although now under
a new title, this time imported from France,
of "connoisseur."
The English painter Jonathan Richardson,

with great fanfare, announced in 1719 "a new
science to the world" which, he says, since "it
is yet without a name," he will call "the
SCIENCE of a CONNOISSEUR." He points
out that in England, unlike in Italy, although
there are many "gentlemen of a just and deli
cate taste in music, poetry, and all kinds of liter
ature. . few lovers and connoisseurs
.very [are]
in painting." His great endeavor, he says, is "to
persuade our nobility and gentry to become
lovers of paintings and connoisseurs. .
.by
shewing the dignity, certainty, pleasure and ad
vantage of that science."
Note two features

of Richardson's exposition.
He points out, first, that in England an
aristocratic connoisseurship ?which he equates,
using our earlier term, with "a just and deli
cate taste? already exists for poetry and music.
He now undertakes to add painting (and, later
in his book, sculpture) to this class ? thereby
linking, for his purposes, four of what were soon
to be grouped as the fine arts. He does so,
however, not on the ground that these arts pos
sess a common nature or shared objective fea
tures, but solely on the ground that they are
all capable of a common function or social
role ?that of yielding to the perceiver what he
describes as "at once an intellectual and a sen
sual pleasure," that is enhanced for "those who
have learned to see these things." Second, he re
veals that a prime value of connoisseurship, in
addition to the refined pleasure that it yields,
is its conspicuous uselessness, which makes it
an index that one belongs to the leisure class ?
in his term, to "our nobility and gentry." Con
noisseurship, Richardson points out, is "not for
the vulgar" the common
(that is, people). The
16
fact that it is a nonproductive, nonutilitarian
way of employing one's time is what enhances
the "dignity" of a connoisseur, making him "al
and esteemed."
ways respected
The virtuoso vogue in the seventeenth cen
tury (asWalter Houghton has pointed out) had

all along been "strongly class-conscious," flaunt
a leisure-time avocation free of material and
ing
utilitarian ends as a of social rank un
sign
a number of virtuosi, like
achievable by what
Peacham, had called "the Vulgar" and requir
ing a cultivated knowledge and taste that serves

to distinguish the "polite" class from social
climbers. This defensiveness of the landed up
per classes against interlopers from below is it
self an index to the instability o? the established
class structure in England, in an era of new
wealth acquired by flourishing commercial and
But the en
manufacturing enterprises. rapidly
class of the well-to-do in the eighteenth
larging
century were not to be foiled by such defen
sive tactics. They simply took over from "the
nobility and gentry" the cultivation of connois
in part as a pleasant pursuit to fill a
seurship,
new-found leisure, but also, clearly, because it
served as a prominent indicator of the gentle
manly or "polite" status to which they aspired.
In his Spectator paper on "Taste," published in

1712, Addison tells his large, primarily middle
class readership that since "the word taste arises
very often in conversation, I shall endeavor to
some account of it and to lay down
give
rules. . .how we that fine taste of
may acquire
writing which is so much talked of among the
world." Such a deliberate cultivation of
polite
connoisseurship in the eighteenth century by
a rapidly expanding part of the population
resulted in a conspicuous set of social innova
tions. I refer to the sudden appearance and ac
celerating development, for the first time in
Western of a great variety of institu
history,
tions and arrangements for making one after
another of the objects of "fine taste"?that is,
products of the diverse arts ?accessible, usually
for pay, to an ever-growing public. I have time
17
to give only a brief overview of this remarka
ble but neglected social phenomenon, in each
of what at that time came to be classified as
"the fine arts," that is, the nonutilitarian arts.
And first, literature. In the latter seventeenth
century, secular literature was still being writ
ten largely under the patronage of the nobility
and of political parties; an author was supported
by writing to order, as an occasion or commis
sion required, or else to gain favor with the pa
tron or patrons on whom he depended for a
livelihood. A century later, this system had
given way to one in which booksellers paid for
and published literary works, and so made
authors reliant on the sale of their books to the
general public. By Dr. Johnson's time, in Ger

many as well as there existed for the
England,
first time a reading public in the modern sense,
large enough to support, though in many in
stances on a level of bare subsistence, a sub
stantial number of writers by the books they
bought. In this period new literary forms were
to satisfy ?
invented the expanding demand
above all the novel, which at first pretended to
be both true and edifying, but soon relaxed into
the candid condition of being produced to be
read merely for the pleasure in the fiction, by
a readership now composed in large part by
tradesmen, and especially the newly-idle wives
and daughters of tradesmen. Another commer
cial institution was invented, the circulating
library, to make literature, and especially nov
els, cheaply available to those who could not
afford, or chose not, to buy them outright. This
was the age also of the emergence and rapid
development of various types of periodical pub
lications. One was the critical review, which
served to guide the public in the appreciation
and appraisal of works of literature. Another
was the magazine, so called because it includ
ed a variety of prose and verse forms. A clear
indication that such new publications owed part
of their appeal to upper-class aspirations is the
fact that the first periodical of this latter type,
published in the 1690s, was named The Gentle
mans Journal, and that in the next century the
18
most successful example (it endured until 1914)
was named The Gentlemans Magazine.
It was, then, in the eighteenth century that
literature became a commodity, subject to the
exchange values of the marketplace, with all the
consequences of such a condition. But for our
present purpose, note that both and books
incorporated literary forms that were
magazines
bought to be read by a reader in isolation, for
the interest and pleasure of doing so, indepen
or specific oc
dently of any practical purpose
casion, and at a distance from their author and
his circumstances. It was in 1710 that the term
belles lettreswas imported from France, to signi
those works which were not doctri
fy literary
nal or utilitarian or instructional, but simply
to taste, as writings to be read for
appealed
pleasure. In the course of time "belles lettres"
became simply "literature" and replaced the
earlier generic term "poetry," which was based
on the construction model; for in the root sense
that endured through the Renaissance, "poetry"
the art of constructing a "poem"?a
signified
word derived from the Greek poiema, "amade
thing."
Music. Through the Renaissance, composed
music (as distinguished from folk-music) had
been available to a broad, nonaristocratic au
or on the occasion
dience only in churches, of
public festivals. The latter seventeenth centu
saw the of the earliest
ry, however, emergence
organizations for making music public ?that

is, accessible to all who were able and willing
to pay to hear it. Examples are the Abendmusiken
and Collegia M?sica in various German towns,
then in Holland and elsewhere. In Restoration
London, public concerts came to be
regular
offered in a number of taverns; and the first
hall specifically designed for public concerts was
constructed in the York buildings. The earli
est of the great public gardens, Vauxhall, be
gan to provide instrumental and vocal
programs both of light and serious music, and
was frequented by all classes of citizens, from
the high nobility down through merchants and
their apprentices ?together with the usual
camp-followers of such diverse crowds. In the
19
process of the eighteenth century, public
concerts ?music for as a
profit, commodity
art?became a matter of course, not in
only
London (as in other major European cities) but
also in cathedral towns, the university towns,
the new industrial cities, and even in many vil
lages, where groups of amateur musicians
offered performances for a small admission fee.
Such concerts included what, in their origin,
had been a of to serve
diversity compositions
different social purposes; all were now equiva
lently presented, however, for no other end than
to provide to a ?
pleasure broad audience
including, specifically, the tired businessman.
As one English commentator put it in 1725,
music is "a charming Relaxation to the Mind,
when fatigued with the Bustle of Business." Var
ious new musical forms, designed to be suita
ble for performance to a large audience and to
be both attractive and intelligible to untrained
listeners, were developed to satisfy the grow
ing demand ?most prominently, the sympho
ny scored for a large orchestra, which was for
the middle-class public very much what the new
novel was for the middle-class reading public.
Painting and sculpture I'll deal with in conjunc
tion. There were contemporary and parallel in
novations in the arrangements for providing
public access to pictures and statues. The Con
tinental Grand Tour, usually lasting several
years and with Italy and Rome as its chief goal,
had by the seventeenth century become almost
as a school for the sons of
obligatory finishing
the high aristocracy in England and elsewhere;
and some graduates of that school emulated no
ble or rich Italian collectors of the visual arts?a
vogue that had begun in Italy in the early
?
Renaissance by buying the works they had
learned to prize. Enormous collections were
gathered ?by purchase, or not as
infrequently
loot following a military conquest ?by princes
and noble landowners, then by wealthy mer
chants and industrialists, in many cities of Eu
rope, and notably in London. In England,
private collectors, from the late seventeenth
through the eighteenth century, acquired the
bulk of the sculpture and paintings that have
20
ever since made England a major place for the
study of the art of Europe, both classical and
post-classical.
Some collectors were doubtless, in some part,
impersonal connoisseurs of works of painting
and sculpture; but their motives were also ac
quisitive and proprietary, and were of

they
course very few in number. Our concern is with
the growing number of nonowners who visit
ed such collections because of interest in the
works themselves. Through most of the seven
teenth century, access to the princely
galleries
had, with few exceptions, been restricted to per
sons of quality and to qualified scholars. But
gradually, as the vogue of art
connoisseurship
spread, and in response to increasing demands,
a number of private were at first de
galleries
facto, then officially, converted into the first pub
lic museums. The British Museum was estab
lished as a national institution in 1759, followed
in 1773 by the establishment of the Vatican
Museum, as well as the Uffizi in
by gallery
Florence; from then to our own time the pub
lic collections have, like insatiable sponges, ab
sorbed ever more of the major works in private
hands.
Other institutional innovations served to feed

the growing appetite for the visual arts. Attend
ing public auctions of visual arts became a
popular amusement; Sotheby's was founded in
the 1740s, and Christie's in 1762. To visit an
nual exhibitions sponsored by academies of liv
ing painters became short of a craze
nothing
and filled both building and street with crowds
of people. Horace Walpole, with his union of
caustic wit and sense of gentility, wrote in 1779
that "the taste for virtu has become universal;
persons of all ranks and degrees set up for con
noisseurs; and even the lowest people tell
familiarly of Hannibal Scratchi, Paul Varnish,
and Raphael Angelo." Walpole's comment is a
humorous exaggeration of the remarkable
diffusion of interest in the visual arts, while his
defensive snobbery reminds us of the persist
ing function of connoisseurship as a sign of so
cial rank. To cite another example: in 1776
21
Thomas Martyn published in two volumes The
Connoisseur, a guide to collections of
English
painting and sculpture "in the palaces and seats
of the nobility and principal gentry of England,"
intended specifically for the instruction of what
he calls "the rising Connoisseur." Now, "the ris
ing connoisseur," translated into modern so
ciologese, is "the upwardly mobile connoisseur";
and Martyn's book ismotivated, he tells us, by
"the great progress which the polite arts have
lately made in England, and the attention
which is now paid them by almost all ranks of
men."
* * *
In sum: during the span of less than one

hundred years, an extensive institutional revo
lution had been effected, with the result that,
by the latter eighteenth century, the cultural sit
uation in England to various degrees, in
(as,
Germany and other was recogniza
countries)
bly the present one, with a large,
primarily
middle-class public for literature, together with
public theaters, public concerts of music, and
public galleries and museums of painting and
We now take such a situation so en
sculpture.
tirely for granted that it requires an effort of

the historical imagination to realize the radi
cal difference this made in the social role of the
arts and, as a in what
consequence, philoso
phers and
critics assumed to be the standard
situation when theorizing about them. Through
the Renaissance and later, works of music,
painting, and sculpture had been produced
mainly to order, on commissions a church
by
man, merchant, town council,
prince, wealthy
or guild; very often they were produced for a
specific function or occasion, religious or secu
lar; and the accomplished work had been ex
perienced by some members of its audience, no
doubt, as the occasion for what we now call an
"aesthetic experience," but at the same time as
thoroughly embedded in a particular institu
tion or event, and as an integral component in
a complex of human activities and functions.
Now, however, the new institution of the pub
lic concert might include pieces, both vocal and
22
instrumental, which had originally served to
sacred feelings in a religious ceremo
intensify
ny, or to add and to a
splendor gaiety private
or celebration, or to provide melodic
public
rhythms for social dancing ?together with new
pieces written for the concert hall itself. There
exist numerous paintings which represent a
room in an eighteenth-century or muse
gallery
um. One can see that they side by side
display
statuary that was both ancient and recent, pa
gan and Christian, sacred and profane. And
the walls display in close array, extending the
of the room and from floor to
length ceiling,
paintings that were originally made to serve as
altar or else as reminiscences of classi
pieces,
cal myth, moral a Flemish bedroom
allegories,
record of a marriage, memorials of historic
events, of a estate, or or
representations family
naments for a noble salon. All
such products,
in the new modes of public distribution or dis
play, have been pulled out of their intended con
texts, stripped of their diverse religious, social,
and political functions, and given a single and
uniform new role: as items to be read or
listened to or looked at simply as a poem, a
musical a statue, a
piece, painting.
Suppose, while you are

at a paint
looking
ing of the Madonna and Child in its original
location in a chapel, you are asked: "What's the
painting for?" A manifest answer is: "To illus
trate, beautifully and expressively, an article of
faith, and thereby to heighten devotion." Now
suppose that same painting moved to the wall
of a museum and let's next to a
hung, say,
representation of Leda and the Swan. To the

question "What's it for?" the obvious answer
now is: "To be admired, and en
contemplated,
joyed." Note that each of these is a valid answer
to the same question ?within the institutional
setting in which that question is asked.
I have reserved for special treatment architec
ture, the fifth of the standard fine arts, because
it is an especially instructive instance of the way
in which an altered social role effected a dras
tic alteration in the conception of a craft. For
of all the fine (that is, nonutilitarian) arts, ar
chitecture seems the most and
obviously
23
thoroughly utilitarian, in that a building is spe
designed to serve as a shelter and to
cifically
subserve a of other ?to be a
variety purposes
sacred place for worship, to house a great fam
and its retainers, or to function as head
ily
quarters for a or social or economic
political
body; as well as to announce by its magnitude,
formal symbolism, and ornament, the status
and wealth of the institution or family for which
it is intended. On the Continental Grand Tour
in the seventeenth century, however, one aim
had been to seek out a diversity of ancient and
modern structures, simply as instances of ar
chitectural achievement. Such a pursuit, hither
to limited to a few members of the aristocracy,
grew enormously in the eighteenth
century. For
this was precisely of the inau
the period both
guration and the rapid development of a new
human activity, and that was the leisure-time
journey, not to Italy but within England itself,
and for no other purpose than to get acquainted
with places and things. Before the end of the
century, this activity had become so widespread
as to require an invented word; that new word
was "tourist." The company of English tourists
included increasing numbers of the middle
classes. A principal aim of the tour, in addi
tion to viewing picturesque landscapes, was to
visit great country houses ?many of these soon
a fee, of
provided (for course) detailed guide
books to the estate ?in order to admire and
judge the works
of art, the interior appoint
ments, and
the landscaped gardens, and very
prominently, the architectural structure itself.
It may surprise you, as it did me, to learn that
in the year 1775 alone, close to 2,500 tourists
visited the famous country estate at Stowe;
multiply that number by ten or twelve, to cor
respond to the increase in the present popula
tion of England, and it turns out that the
popularity of English tourism, very soon after
that activity began, nearly equalled its popular
ity now. You will recall that the turning point
of the novel Pride
and Prejudice, which Jane
Austen began writing in 1798, occurs when
Elizabeth Bennet is taken by her aunt and un
cle, the Gardiners ?who, the author stresses,
24
are "in trade," members of the merchant mid
dle class ?on a vacation tour that includes her
rejected lover Darcy's great estate of Pember
at a time when its owner is supposedly
ley,
absent.
It is also noteworthy that in the eighteenth

century a market for
flourishing developed
books of engraved views of royal palaces and
famous urban and country houses. Buildings
can't easily be relocated in museums, but these
published engravings served as a museum
without walls, hence as yet another vehicle to
move works of architecture into their new and
widespread social like the products
role as, of
sculpture and painting, a set of to be
things
as such,
pored over, simply for their capacity
to interest and give pleasure to the observer.
What had been a utilitarian craft thus became
an art ?a fine art.
* * *
What we find, then, beginning late in the

seventeenth century, is the emergence of an
astonishing number of institutions for making
a of human artifacts public ?as com
diversity
modities, usually for pay?in order to satisfy
a demand for the delights, but also
burgeoning
for the social distinction, of connoisseurship.
The sum of these changes constitute a new
"form of life" (in Wittgenstein's phrase) in the
leisure-time pursuits both of the high-born and
the newly well-to-do. Since humankind is an
and loquacious being, a new form
enquiring
of life calls for an appropriate language ?a set
of terms for sorting things out, and for sys
tematizing and analyzing them, in accordance
with the altered mode of common or normal
experience. In such an enterprise, the normal

readily becomes the normative ex
experience
The new critical
perience. language, according
a product of art from the
ly, does not envision
traditional point of view of its expert construc
tor or maker, but from the point of view of the
connoisseur, who confronts the work as a com
pleted product which

he attends to as an iso
lated thing, for the sake of the satisfactions that
doing so yields. And certain hitherto largely
25
distinct and
diversely classified human
products ?especially poetry, music, painting,
?
sculpture, architecture since all of them have
now on a broad scale, the same so
acquired,
cial role as standard objects for connoisseur
ship, are for the first time classified together
as an entirely distinctive class of things called
"the fine arts." Addison, with his customary acu
men, identified this new principle of classifi
cation when he remarked in The Spectator that
the "fine arts derive their laws and rules from
the genuine taste of mankind, not from the
principles of these arts themselves." This is a

contemporary recognition of the turn from the
construction model to the spectator model for
the newly identified class of the fine arts; and
for the philosophy of this class of objects, the
German theorist Baumgarten in the mid
eighteenth century coined the term "aesthetics."
In such a philosophy, works of fine art,
despite their conspicuous differences in physi
cal and other attributes, are naturally enough
assumed to share a distinctive quality
or essence
that enables them to perform their common
role as objects of connoisseurship. This role,
although often requiring payment of a fee, was,
anomalously, not utilitarian or moral but spe
cifically a diversion or escape from ordinary
utilitarian and moral interests and pursuits.
The essential feature that qualified a product
to be accounted a work of fine art was accord
ingly identified as its inherent capacity to serve

as a sufficient and rewarding object of atten
tion as an end in itself?a elusive, non
very
material feature that Kant called its "beauty"
or "form" or "aesthetic
quality."
To put what I have just said in a different
philosophical idiom: the condition and status
of being a work of art, in accordance with the
standard definition of art-as-such, is not an in
herent fact but an institutional fact. The most
prominent institution which functions to con
fer this status has become the public museum;
the art-of-arts, which over the cen
exemplary
turies had been
poetry, become has
painting,
in which the product is hung on a wall and iso
lated from its surroundings by a material frame;
26
and the disinterested and absorbed contempla
tion of an isolated art object ?the paradigmatic
?
experience of the theory of art-as-such is typi
cally a museum experience. The power of be
ing accepted and displayed by a reputable
museum to transform a utilitarian into
object
a work of fine art was re
melodramatically
vealed when Marcel Duchamp took a very
homely utility, machine-made and mass
produced?a urinal ?from the thousands of its
duplicates and had it mounted on a museum
wall. Many of us, once the initial shock or in
dignation or derisive laughter has worn off, suc
cumb to the institutional compulsion, assume
the aesthetic attitude, and begin to contemplate
the object as such, in its austerely formal and
monochromatic
harmony.
IV.
Let me anticipate what some of you are no

doubt thinking, and admit that the conditions
for the emergence of the theory of art-as-such
are not so simple as I have made out. In this
short presentation, I have had to omit a num
ber of complications and qualifications. Above
all, I have omitted a surprising fact, which be
comes evident if we turn our attention
only
from the sociology of art to intellectual histo
ry. I said that the theory of art-as-such was a
radical conceptual innovation of the eighteenth
century. That assertion is valid, so long as we
limit our purview to the basic concepts and
operative vocabulary within earlier theories of
the arts. But if we take a more comprehensive
historical overview, we find that the vantage
point, the defining concepts, and the distinc
tive of art-as-such were
vocabulary actually
?
commonplaces indeed, they were very old and
familiar commonplaces; they had functioned,
however, not in the traditional philosophy and
criticism of the arts, but in alien realms of
metaphysics, and especially of theology These
ancient commonplaces were imported into, and
specialized for, the theory of fine art ?they
achieved, that is, a radical novelty of
?
application only when the new social role of
the various arts invited and fostered concepts
27
of a requisite sort. It seems highly
likely that,
if these concepts and terms had not existed
ready-made, modern aesthetics could not have
developed so quickly from its beginnings into
the complex, complete, and sophisticated form
of Kant's Critique ofJudgment.
I have told this story at some length else
where, and have time only to present a few
highlights. The prototypical conception of an
object that evokes a selfless and absorbed con
templation is Plato's Idea of Ideas ?that ulti
mate essence, uniting Beauty, Goodness, and
Truth that Plato posited as the terminus of all
human love and desire. The ultimate
knowledge, and the supreme
value, Pla human
to says, is "the contemplation with the eye of
the mind" of "beauty absolute, separate, sim
ple, and everlasting"?an entity which is "per
fect" because, possessing autarkeia, it is utterly
self-sufficient.Plotinus, following Plato, simi
larly endowed his Absolute with the attribute
of being "wholly self-sufficing," "self-closed," and
"autonomous." And in passages of high conse
quence for later Christian thought ?and if I am
right, also for modern aesthetics ?Plotinus
described the highest good of the human soul
to be "contemplation" of the essential Beauty
and Good which is a state of "perfect surrender"
of the self that constitutes "the soul's peace," with
"no no desire. .
passion, outlooking .reasoning
is in abeyance and all Intellection and
even. . . the self." The soul in this contem
very
plation "has in perfect stillness attained iso

lation."
By one of the strangest developments in in

tellectual history, this pagan concept of a self
sufficient Absolute Beauty, which is to be con
templated without reference either to the self
or to its own bounds, became
anything beyond
thoroughly identified, early in Christian the
ology, with the God of the Old Testament, a
very personal God. He is described in the Bi
ble as creative, loving, just, and often very an
gry, but is never said to be beautiful or
self-sufficient or an impersonal essence or Ab
solute. It was St. Augustine who, in his emi
nently influential expositions of the nature of
28
Christian cantas, or love, early in the fifth cen
tury, was more than anyone responsible for this
fusion of the Christian God and the classical
Absolute; and in doing so he promulgated the
lexicon of the categories and terms that, some
fourteen hundred years later, came to consti
tute the spectator's vantage and the contempla
tion model of the theory of art-as-such.
Augustine's controlling distinction is between
uti and frui, between loving something for its
use and loving something for pure enjoyment,
as an end in itself. All the good and beautiful
are to be loved
things in this world, he asserts,
for their utility, as a means to something else.
Of all things in the universe, God, and God
alone, because He is the ultimate in beauty and
excellence, is to be loved with a pure enjoyment,
and in a visio Dei', that is, in a contemplation
of God by "the eye of the mind." And Augustine
details the loving contemplation of God's
supreme beauty and excellence in terms
familiar to us: He is enjoyed as His own end,
and non propter aliud, for His own sake (propter
se for His inherent excellence
ipsam), simply
?
and, in Augustine's repeated term, gratis that
is, gratuitously, of our personal
independently
interests or of any possible reward. Here are
all the elements of the of art-as-such; the
theory
radical change is the shift of reference from God
to a beautiful work of art as the sufficient ob
ject of contemplative enjoyment, and not by the
eye of the mind but by the physical eye.
The crossing over of these theological terms,
especially "contemplation" and "disinterested,"
into aesthetic theory occurred, as I have indi
cated earlier, in 1711 in the book by the Earl
of Shaftesbury entitled Characteristics. The ex
press subject of Shaftesbury's urbane essays,
?
however, was not aesthetics or art his book has
been preempted by historians of aesthetics only
retrospectively?but religion, morals, and the
life-style appropriate to a gentleman. Shaftes
bury's ideal is the virtuoso ideal of connoisseur
a mode of which
ship, contemplation (in his
Platonic way of thinking) applies equally to
God, to objects of beauty, and to moral good
ness. Shaftesbury's first published work had
29
been a theological essay demonstrating that
God is to be loved not from a desire for per
sonal gain, nor as "aMean, but [as] an End,"
and "for what he is in himself," in "his own Love
liness, Excellency, and Beauty." In his later
Characteristics, Shaftesbury imports the rest of
Augustine's vocabulary, which he applies
primarily to theology and morality, and secon
to the beauties of nature or of works of
darily
art.
I shall cite one

thinker, German
largely
neglected by historians
aesthetics, Karl of
Philipp Moritz, who in 1785, five years before
Kant's Critique, published a short essay which
is the earliest unqualified presentation of the
view of art-as-such. The essay demonstrates
that, in little more seventy than

years after
Shaftesbury, distinctive these
theological and
moral terms have not only become specialized
to the arts, but are used to oppose the ex
of a work of art to religious and moral
perience
experience, as well as to all practical concerns.
Only the mechanical or useful arts, Moritz says,

have an "outer end"?that an end "outside
is,
themselves in other." He poses in
something
stead a contemplation model for discussing the
fine arts:
In the contemplation [Betrachtung] of the

beautiful object... I contemplate it as some
thing which is completed, not in me, but in its

own which therefore constitutes a whole
self,
in itself, and affords me pleasure for its own
sake [um sein selbst willen].
In adding to this formulation the further con

cepts of aesthetic disinterestedness and the self
of a work of art, Moritz inadver
sufficiency
tently reveals the degree to which his views are
indebted to the ancient Plotinian and Augus
tinian representation of the selfless and gratu
itous contemplation of the ultimate beauty of
God:
While the beautiful draws our attention ex

to itself. . .we seem to lose ourselves
clusively
in the beautiful object; and precisely this loss,
this forgetfulness of self, is the highest degree
of pure and disinterested that beau
pleasure
30
us. In that moment we sacrifice our
ty grants
individual confined being to a kind of higher
. . . in a work of art is not
being. Beauty
. .until I it as
pure. contemplate something
that has been brought forth entirely for its
own sake, in order that it should be some
thing complete in itself.
Kant must
surely have studied Moritz's
?there are many I haven't
writings parallels
cited ?but he stripped away the patent indi
cators in Moritz of an origin in a Platonized
Christian theology. Other writers ofthat time,
however ?like a number of more recent propo
nents of art-as-such, from Flaubert and Clive
Bell through James Joyce and some of the
American New Critics ?manifest the tenden
cy of a contemplation theory of art to recuper
ate aspects of its original context in religious
devotion. Here isWilhelm Wackenroder, for
example, writing in 1797, seven years after
Kant's Critique, on the experience of objects of
art-as-such; and explicitly, now, in what has
become their normative setting in a public
museum:
Art . to be
galleries. .ought temples where,
in still and silent humility and in heart-lifting
solitude, we admire artists as the
may great
mortals. . .with stead
highest among long,
fast contemplation of their works. ... I com
pare the of nobler works of art to

enjoyment
. . Works
. of art, in their no more
prayer. way,
fit into the common flow of life than does the
of God.... That is for me a
thought day
sacred which ... I devote to the con
holiday
of noble works of art.
templation
V.
Well, what does this excursion into social

and intellectual come to?
history
The theory of art-as-such consists of asser
tions that have been claimed, or assumed,
by
a number of philosophers and critics to be
timeless truths about a distinctive class of ar
tifacts. I have proposed, on the other hand, that
it is a way of talking about art that emerged
at a particular time, as an integral and
reciprocative element in an altering form of
31
social life, marked by the development of many
new institutions to make highly diverse human
products widely public, and for no other os
tensible purpose than simply to be attended
to for their own sake. I have also proposed that
these changes were in part motivated by the
prestige of connoisseurship, and of a
nonutilitarian aesthetic culture, as a sign of
upper-class status; and furthermore, that the
determinative idiom and concepts of the new
were translocated into the realm of art,
theory
ready-made, from the realm of a Platonized
Christian theology.
I do not, however, mean to assert that this
of art is, as a consequence, an invalid
theory
theory. It describes the way that, in our present
circumstances, many of us in fact frequently
experience works of art. Furthermore, when
a theory of art is put to work in applied criti
cism, its provenience ceases to matter, and the
criterion of its validity becomes the profitabil
ity of what it proves capable of doing. (The
same holds for some of the profitable theories
in the natural sciences, which have also had
a strange, and even dubious, In
provenience.)
criticism, the view of art-as-such has fostered
an unprecedented analysis of the complex ele
ments, internal relations, and modes of organi
zation of works of art that has undeniably
deepened and subtilized our experience of
them. This theory has also been held as their
working hypothesis by major modern artists,
including such literary masters as Flaubert,
Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov.
It is, then, in this heuristic and pragmatic
sense, a valid theory; but like all competing
views of art, it is also a partial theory. It is a
very profitable way of when we want
talking,
to deal with a work of any of the arts simply
in its formal aspects and internal organization.
For some kinds of works, this way of talking
is relatively adequate. But if we turn to King
Lear, or Bach's St. Matthews Passion, or the fres
coes of Michelangelo in their
(still, happily,
situation in the Sistine ?or
original Chapel)
for that matter, to Byron's comic masterpiece,
?
the view of art-as-such, while it re
Donju?n
32
mains pertinent, becomes woefully inadequate.
We need to substitute a different perspective,
and a very different critical vocabulary, to be
gin to do justice to the diverse ends and func
tions of such works, and the patent way that
our to them involve our shared ex
responses
periences, appeal to our convictions about the

world and our life in that world, implicate our
moral interests, and engage our deepest hu
man concerns.
M. H. Abrams is Class of 1916 Professor of English

Literature Emeritus at Cornell University.
33

American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics

Art-as-Such: The Sociology

For the two centuries

upon (or in some views, destructive of) the

The object of aesthetic contemplation is

The other is a felicitous summation by Iris

Such formulations are usually presented by

Theorists of the various arts, from classical

had analyzed its attributes in terms of a con

ing the work to a particular social occasion or

tacitly presuppose, not

The perceiver's stance and

major arts is the one that had recently become,

painting, sculpture, architecture, and music ?to

concept-free and end-independent encounter

(f?r sich selbst), in strict independence from what

Aspects of Kant's theory were quickly adopt

variety of human products, from poetry to ar

A conspicuous phenomenon in the seven

The English painter Jonathan Richardson,

Note two features

tury (asWalter Houghton has pointed out) had

ing a cultivated knowledge and taste that serves

In his Spectator paper on "Taste," published in

general public. By Dr. Johnson's time, in Ger

organizations for making music public ?that

quisitive and proprietary, and were of

Other institutional innovations served to feed

In sum: during the span of less than one

tirely for granted that it requires an effort of

Suppose, while you are

representation of Leda and the Swan. To the

It is also noteworthy that in the eighteenth

What we find, then, beginning late in the

experience. In such an enterprise, the normal

pleted product which

principles of these arts themselves." This is a

ingly identified as its inherent capacity to serve

Let me anticipate what some of you are no

plation "has in perfect stillness attained iso

By one of the strangest developments in in

I shall cite one

that, in little more seventy than

Only the mechanical or useful arts, Moritz says,

In the contemplation [Betrachtung] of the

thing which is completed, not in me, but in its

In adding to this formulation the further con

While the beautiful draws our attention ex

thing complete in itself.

pare the of nobler works of art to

Well, what does this excursion into social

periences, appeal to our convictions about the

M. H. Abrams is Class of 1916 Professor of English

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