THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS 429 



THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS 



By Professor IRA W. HOWERTH 



THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 



nnHE conventional classification of the arts into useful, mechanic 

 -•- or industrial, and liberal, polite or fine is unscientific. It will 

 not stand before even a superficial examination. Fine and useful are 

 by no means mutually exclusive terms. The fine arts are useful, and 

 the useful arts should be fine. The art that paints a picture or chisels 

 a statue satisfies the desire for beauty. It is, therefore, useful for the 

 same reason that cooking or farming or making shoes is useful. All 

 that the word useful implies is satisfaction of desire, and this is the 

 object of all the arts. On the other hand, the word fine, as applied to 

 art, does not signify the absence of utility, but merely that the art has 

 been brought to a certain degree of perfection (polite-polished), and 

 that its practise is associated with gentility. There is no inherent 

 reason why a useful art may not become a fine art. Obviously, then, 

 the division of the arts into fine and useful is not dichotomous. One 

 might as well divide the sciences into practical and interesting. 



But are not the fine arts to be distinguished from the useful arts 

 on the ground that the former involve the use of the imagination and 

 the realization of the beautiful? It is true, of course, that the fine 

 arts are par excellence the imaginative arts, and that they minister 

 chiefly to the esthetic sense. Still, even this fact does not distinguish 

 them wholly from the useful or industrial arts. Intelligence, imagina- 

 tion and pleasure are elements to be found in all the arts. Art really 

 implies intelligence, and it is clear that imagination and pleasure may 

 enter into invention as well as into the so-called creative arts. 



What, then, is the basis of the familiar classification? It is the 

 relative historical circumstances under which the respective arts origi- 

 nated and have been developed. The useful, mechanic or industrial 

 arts are allied to productive labor, and their history is the history of 

 labor; while the liberal, polite or fine arts have always been associated 

 with leisure and culture. 



Now productive labor, as everybody knows who is in the least 

 familiar with industrial history, was originally imposed by the con- 

 quering upon the conquered. It was a function of the slave. Hence 

 to labor has attached the odium of slavery. A life of productive labor 

 was, in the earlier history of mankind, prima facie evidence of subjec- 

 tion and inferiority. This was true not only among barbarians, but 



