Fine and popular art - Essay Example

Such processes, although perhaps considered the results of skilled craftsmanship and artisanship in both the academy and the popular mind, were not generally believed to lend themselves to the type of refined art-making that the serious artist pursued. By emphasizing the role that art plays in popular culture and vice-versa, however, the pop art movement attempted to bridge the gap between what had been for the last several hundred years a strict division between the fine arts and the popular arts. . While both may deal with such topics as race, economics, poverty, gender, and the like through their approaches to meeting human needs and providing form that shapes human content, the fine arts have traditionally been considered to be driven by a special refined quality that is sensitive and sensible and that revolves around a particular kind of insight and training, while the popular arts have traditionally been viewed as meeting economic needs with skilled action.

The difference, in other words, seems to be a psychological one as well as an economic one. Popular artists apply skills to developing products and goods that, while beautiful, are primarily functional. Fine artists develop products which are primarily communicative. Larry Shriner, in his book The Invention of Art, argues that it was only in the 18th Century that the fine arts split off from the popular arts. Until that time many of the artists that today are considered serious fine artists from the past were essentially considered to very highly skilled artisans in their own day, and their works were considered to be highly representative forms of skilled craftsmanship.

In 18th Century Europe, however, a cultural elite began to make distinctions between craftsmanship and “art” in order to separate themselves from the masses in taste and practice. The effort was so successful that they began to define art backwards, and works of skilled artisanship that were, for example, found in the colonies conquered by this cultural elite came to be called “primative art” – as though such products were approaching fine art but had not yet arrived. Shriner’s argument suggests that the distinction between fine art and the popular arts is largely