Rapid secularization during the Enlightenment period stimulated inerest in a variety of new subjects. One of these new areas of interest came to be called "aesthetics": a concern with elucidating principles such as taste and beauty that govern all the arts and indeed make them examples of fine "art." Until the Enlightenment, no other society had considered art to be an entity in itself, to be set apart from its context of use (usually in ceremony or entertainment) or the content that it portrayed or suggested. What seems to us to be self-evident "art" (e.g., paintings, sculpture, poems, motets, cantatas or—in other societies—carvings, urns, figurines, masks, ornaments, dramatic performances) were not regarded as such by their makers or users. They found no reason to assume that these belonged in a nameable superordinate category, "art," that suggests a special mode of working or noteworthy social identity (being an "artist" rather than simply someone who paints) or a special result (a "work of art" rather than an altarpiece or ancestor figure).
As the subject of aesthetics developed over the next century, a startling and influential idea took hold. This idea held that there is a special frame of mind for appreciating works of art: a "disinterested" attitude that disregards any consideration of one's own personal interest in the object, its utility, or its social or religious ramifications. This unprecedented idea led to still another: the work of art is a world-in-itself, made solely or primarily as an occasion for this kind of detached aesthetic experience, which was considered to be one of the highest forms of mental activity.
"Disinterest" implied that one could transcend the limitations of time, place, and temperament, and react to the artwork of eras far removed from one's own—whether or not one understood the meaning they had had for their original makers and users. In this sense, art was "universal." Another key idea that gradually developed in the field of aesthetics was that works of art were vehicles for a special kind of knowledge—a knowledge that, with the waning of religious belief, often took on the spiritual aura and authority once restricted to the church. Still another corollary was the idea of art for art's sake (or life for art's sake), suggesting that art had no purpose but to "be" and to provide opportunities for enjoying an aesthetic experience that was its own reward, and that one could have no higher calling than to open oneself to these heightened moments.
As paintings became less and less like mirrors held up to nature or to society, viewers could no longer decipher or naively admire them. Critics assumed ever-greater importance as mediators between the artist and the public because someone had to explain to the mystified public what made an artwork good or bad and even what a work "meant." In England, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Clive Bell and Roger Fry were extremely influential as they invoked "formalist" criteria for appreciating the puzzling new work of postimpressionists such as Cezanne, or the cubists, work that could not be understood with the serviceable old standards (that anyone could recognize) of beauty of conception, nobility of subject matter, representational accuracy, or communication of valued truths. Art had become, if not a religion, at least an ideology whose principles were articulated by and for the few who had leisure and education enough to acquire them.
More elaborate and abstract formalist standards were developed America by critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg in order to justify abstract expressionism, a midcentury school of painting that affronted sensibilities and challenged what had previously been acceptable as art. Terms such as "flatness," "purity," and "picture plane" became the verbal tokens of the transcendent meanings viewers were told they could find in the skeins and blobs and washes of paint. Because these values were not easily apparent to the untutored observer, appreciating au became more than ever an elite activity, requiring an apprenticeship and dedication not unlike that of the artist. Never in question was the "high art" assumption that works of art—no matter how strange they looked or how unskilled they seemed to be—were conduits of transcendent, supernatural values, of truths from the unconscious, expressions or revelations of universal human concerns that the artist was uniquely endowed to apprehend and transmit.
As the "isms" proliferated and art became more esoteric and outrageous, the role of the critic became not only helpful but integral to the reception of works of art. Looking back, it seems inevitable that an "institutional" theory of art arose to explain what art is. As formulated by George Dickie (1974) and Arthur Danto (1964) (who were describing what was the case, not advocating or defending it), an artworld (one word) composed of critics, dealers, gallery owners, museum directors, curators, art-magazine editors, and so forth, was the source of conferring the status "work of art" on objects. What artists made were "candidates for appreciation," and if the artworld bought and sold them, wrote about them, displayed them, they were thereby validated as "art"—not before.
Implicit in this account is a recognition that what is said and written about a work is not only necessary to its being categorized as art, but is indeed perhaps more important than the work itself (Wolfe 1975). There is no appreciation of art without interpretation. We can tell that a pile of stones or a stack of gray felt displayed in a museum is different from a pile of stones on the pavement outside the museum or a stack of felt in a carpet store next to the museum because the objects in the museum are viewed through a lens of knowledge of their place in a tradition. "To see something as art at all," proclaimed Danto (1981, 135), "demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art." In this view, there are no naive artists and no naive art: today's artists can both explain the theories behind the works that are to be seen in museums and galleries and place their own works in these traditions.
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