I thought one of the old elitisms/racisms had died until I saw a documentary on a Cable channel ( I don't recall which) about pre-historic humans. Academicians were discussing some female statuettes from ice-age Europe. One of the "experts" said that the sculpted female forms were not "art" because they were probably fertility charms. So because the statues served a ritual purpose, and not being the "pure self-expression" of a their human creator, they were not "art."
Once I read an art critic describe the great U.S. painter Andrew Wyeth as "merely an illustrator", and not an artist, because a lay person can look at a Wyeth painting and actually know what s/he is supposed to be looking at.
So was Michelangelo's painting on the Sistine Chapel,
merely an "illustration" because the painter used Biblical themes, and was Michelangelo not an "artist" because the Church clearly commissioned the work and because his paintings served a religious purpose?
Apparently so.
"Art" is only what a "pure" or "fine" artist does. That which is the pure self-expression, emerging from the artist's own soul, ego or whatever. If this art serves any other purpose, then it is no longer art, but "crafts." Designs on a pot or a quilt are crafts are not "art", no matter how much artistic creativity, patience and technical skill is required to pull it off, because pots and quilts serve a purpose beside looking pretty.
Of course, you can see where I'm going with this. That means the only "artists" are those privileged enough to attend college and elite art schools. Other creative people, who express their creativity on other projects, are merely "craftspeople." This cleverly removes whole fields of creative work from competing with the "fine art" world. Scratch off graffiti artists, tatoo artists, African tribal sculptors, Appalachian quilters, Navajo weavers, auto detailers, and scores of other types of artisans who have never attended an academy of fine arts.
Following this nonsense to its logical conclusion also eliminates Western artists who actually do train in prestigious art academies and then work for several years in advertising, animation, graphic design, children's book illustration, and comics before pursuing their individual modes of artistic self-expression.
OVER CATEGORIZATION OF CREATIVE EXPRESSION: The Eurowestern academy spends a lot of time categorizing various aspects of reality. Not to oppose this, but the motive is not always out of a pure desire for understanding of reality, but to serve some political purpose. When the Academy decides some complex skill is not art, it guarantees that the practitioner can not be measured against the more privileged practitioners who are within the Academy. The Eurowestern Academy often seeks to create the illusion that Europe is the only creator of various fields of endeavor, and thereby deny the creative genius that has arisen in other cultures.
Its been said that the novel is the supreme literary creation of the world. I must admit, a good novel is an impressive thing to behold. In college I was taught that the novel was a creation of Europe and Europe alone. Other cultures created epic poems, "myths," and songs but the prose work we call a novel was the creation of Europe. Again, an outright lie.
A Roman North African writer, Apulieus, produced
Tales of the Golden Ass in the second century AD (or C.E.). It is a mixture of comic and tragic episodes, linked together by the journey of a man transformed into a donkey by spiritual forces.
The Golden Ass also includes the tale of Cupid and Psyche, from which we get our modern terms "psychology" and "psychiatry" and the basis for the medieval tale,
Beauty and the Beast. The Golden Ass ends when the protagonist finds redemption from the deity Isis, whose true name is known by the Ethiopians.
The Golden Ass reads alot like Cervantes'
Don Quixote, (written a thousand years later) and I don't know why it is not considered a novel in the Eurowestern tradition. Perhaps its origins are not European enough.
When A Novel is Not a Novel:
In grad school I read an article about novels produced in Hausa culture in West Africa. For a period in the late (European) Middle Ages) the literate Muslim culture produced long works of prose fiction, based on current events. The article described one epic novel, written by an African enslaved as a child, sent to Egypt, and who then gained his freedom. He returned to Hausaland (now northern Nigeria) and wrote a fictional account of a boy who is enslaved, survives and returns to his homeland. The work is fiction and the writer did not claim it was his life story verbatim, though historians considered it valuble nonetheless because of the details it provided of the slave trade of that time period.
But here is the kicker. The scholar who wrote the article continually referred to the artform as the
Hausa "novel" (italics added). The scholar, or his editors, could not bring himself to refer to these Hausa fictional prose works as novels, despite all the identical characteristics with the Eurowestern novel. So even this scholarly treatment diminished the Hausa novel by always placing
novel in quotation marks.
If the Hausa novel did not show any evidence of having been influenced by Europe, then it was not "really" a novel.
Superiority that Can Not Stand the Competition:
Most readers will probably be more familiar with this phenomenom as it has played out in the world of Sports. Even (or especially) at the height of white Eurowestern world power, whites were uneasy about competing against blacks on the fields of athletics. One world champion boxer flatly refused to fight black American Jack Johnson, the only real contender, on the grounds that it was beneath him to fight a Negro and would demean the title of "champion."
There was a fear that one on one, stripped of all money, military power and color privilege, the strongest white man might not be stronger than the stongest black man, and that would put a crack in the illusion of the superiority not only of the white military machine, but in the natural superiority or every white man over everyone black.
For decades, the Olympics adhered to a strict rule against professional athletes competing in the Games. Supposedly an athlete who had gotten paid for his efforts was no longer a "pure" athlete. The International Olympic commitee used this rule
to strip the gold medals from Native American athlete Jim Thorpe (who later founded the NFL) because it learned that Thorpe had played minor league professional baseball.
The real reason professional athletes were not allowed into the Olympics was to prevent them from competing with upper class athletes from families whose fortunes could support them as they trained for the Games. A poor man who used his athletic skills to put food on the table was eliminated from the competition. It had nothing to do with his (or her) ability that s/he had gotten paid cash for past athletic endeavors. This rule guaranteed that the upper classes need never be humbled by the lower classes on the field of competition.
The Final Question:
This begs the question: if one is so convinced of one's superiority, why must one work so hard to keep it from being tested? Wouldn't natural superiority just naturally win all the time and be willing to defend itself against all challenges?
Notes and Sources:
Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee),
Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, 2006, for use of the term "Eurowestern," which I prefer to "white" and because it can encompass Europeans, the U.S. Canada, Australia, and even parts of Africa, India and the Caribbean where the Euro-colonial outlook dominates thought.
Apuleius,
Tales of the Golden Ass
Mariba Ani,
Yurugu: an African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior., 1994. In Chapter 3, "Asthetics: the Power of Symbols" , Dr. Ani writes ". . .'Arts or art's sake' is a peculiarly European and should be rejected as a critical standard for other cultures. . ." She goes into much more depth about the connection about how political and economic power is used to decide what is considered "beautiful," and how the goal is not really about beauty but about upholding power.
