What is Art? - Southwestern Law School

114 J. INT’L MEDIA &ENTERTAINMENT LAW VOL. 4,NO. 2sent they have entered the tradition as if by simple chronologicaldistance.” 8C. ArtistsEven though there is ample evidence of surviving art and artefactsand architecture from the dawn of civilisation, there is little knowledgeof the identity of their authors. 9 It was not until the 17th century, chieflyduring the Golden Age of art and architecture in the Netherlands andduring the Qing Dynasty in China, that surviving records began to identifyartists as we have come to know them today—creating works on aspeculative basis and offering them for sale in the open market.The interaction of social and economic changes, over time, provideskeys to our understanding of why societies gradually embraced thepractice of artist as a distinct career—“of men who spend all theirtime in the production of useless things . . . who are exempted fromgrowing food.” 10 Urban dwellers have always relied on buying surplusesproduced by rural labour, and especially in cities where a significantmass of wealthy and powerful people—high net worth individuals—can also afford to patronise original creations of the ‘artist’.D. Art BusinessDirect patronage of the wealthy and powerful was the principalsource of income for creators of art and artefacts and architectureuntil the 17th century, or so. Scientific, technical, and industrial inventionsand developments from around this era (and beyond, to date) increasinglyfacilitated the creation of artworks that were moveable andtransportable objects. This led to: the practice of collecting uniqueand desirable art objects, also and increasingly by the newly rising8. Id.9. “In the Middle Ages the individual artist remains invisible behind the corporatefacades of church and guild. Greco-Roman and Chinese histories alone report in anydetail the conditions of individual artists’ lives. A few names and lines of text are allwe have about Egyptian dynastic artisans. The records of the other civilisations of antiquityin America, Africa, and India tell nothing of artists’ lives. Yet the archaeologicalrecord repeatedly shows the presence of connected series of rapidly changingmanufactures in the cities, and slower ones in the provinces and in the countryside,all manifesting the presence of persons whom we call artists.” KUBLER, note 6 supra.10. The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman was an exhibition held at The British Museumin London in 2012. It was an installation of new works by Turner Prize winnerGrayson Perry, comprising objects made by unknown men and women throughout historyfrom the British Museum’s collection alongside new works by Perry; who explained:“This is a memorial to all the anonymous craftsmen that over the centurieshave fashioned the manmade wonders of the world. . .The craftsman’s anonymityI find especially resonant in an age of the celebrity artist.” See http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/grayson_perry/introduction.