ABSTRACT
Within the division of artistic labour in modern^ societies (since the renaissance) producers have sometimes decided, or been required, to specialise in certain types of artwork. This could be a matter of only using one medium (such as watercolours) or restricting themselves to narrow subject^ matter (such as portraiture) popular with a group of patrons. The range of reasons for this kind of specialising activity was wide: they involved, for example, objective factors, such as (1) the art market at a certain time and place for various kinds of product, and (2) the available skills training for artists living in certain locations with access to local materials. Subjective choices made by artists at a particular time might relate to beliefs and values – for instance, the idea that the use of egg-tempera paint on board rather than oil on canvas had a distinctive expressive^ quality with important spiritual or moral connotations (a view held by the Nazarenes, or ‘Brotherhood of St Luke’, in early-nineteenth-century Vienna, who wished to revive Christian values in art). By the late nineteenth century it is possible to see specialist pro-
duction within modern art as a choice made by avant-garde artists who rejected academic^ institutional training, techniques, and the conventions associated with life-drawing, history^ painting, and the ‘hierarchy of the genres’. But this was not simply a matter of practical or aesthetic values; or, rather, those choices – to do with media, techniques, and composition – were bound up with both implicit and explicit social and political positions and interests. For while some chose to specialise in types of painted imagery (for instance, Vincent van Gogh’s concern to study and depict peasants at work and leisure, in The Potato Eaters (1885)), others, such as those who might be identified as some of the first ‘art photographers’ – such as Alfred Stieglitz and Man Ray – rejected traditional twodimensional media altogether and attempted to find new forms and technologies of visual expression entirely unrelated to what they saw as painting’s old-fashioned academic past. The group of theoretical categories to which specialist belongs – the
other two are alternative and oppositional – is best used, and most valuable within, actual art-historical inquiry, and exists to be tested and revised within that active and open study of actual artists and artworks. Specialist production, as part of a complex division of labour, has existed for many centuries. Indeed, the early, decisive, development occurred thousands of years ago when societies around the world became large and complex enough to begin to separate out,
and support, something identifiable as visual-representational production. This, in most cases, had religious or, at least, ritualistic, roots in social organisation and its reproduction. Consider, for example, the ornamental/sculptural bronze lamp-holders from Lach Truong, in the Dong-son culture of what is now China and Indonesia (500200 BCE). But it was not until the sixteenth century in Europe that the concepts of art and artist in their modern senses came into existence. Specialist artistic production then increasingly became part of the development of a commodity-based economy within commercial, technocratic, and highly class-stratified societies.
