Teens/adults - Lesson 2: Lessons of the sensitive and refined plumber

The oldest continually operating public art museum in America is the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, founded in 1842 and opened in 1844. All three of America’s first major art museums were incorporated the same year: 1870, in Boston, Washington, DC, and New York. By the end of the century more than two dozen museums in other American cities followed their example. Unlike Europe’s great art museums that were a remnant of royal patronage (and plundering), American museums, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s founder Joseph Choate, aimed to “gather together a more or less complete collection of objects illustrative of the history of art in all its branches, from the earliest beginnings to the present time, which should serve not only for the instruction and entertainment of the people, but should also show to the students and artisans of every branch of industry, in the high and acknowledged standards of form and color, what the past has accomplished for them to imitate and excel.” [1] This was a change of public sentiment toward art. America’s founding fathers were skeptical of fine art. John Adams saw French art, for example, as antidemocratic. [2] But after the era of P.T. Barnum and the Civil War, and with the rising class of wealthy American collectors in the years before the twentieth century, art museums took root in American cities. They took on an unusual civic role, as well: to tame the unwashed hoards. 

In 1897, a plumber walked up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and was denied entry. This became a scandal, as the newspaper headlines blared, “Sober Workman Has to Leave Art Galleries. Art for the Well Dressed. Sensitive and Refined Plumber Affronted.” The president of the Metropolitan responded to his boss, the president of the Department of Parks, with a revealing update on the public’s manners inside the Museum, “You do not see any more persons in the picture galleries blowing their noses with their fingers; no more dogs brought into the Museum openly or concealed in baskets. There is no more spitting tobacco juice on the gallery floors, to the disgust of all other visitors. There are no more nurses taking children to some corner to defile the floors of the Museum….” As art historian Calvin Tomkins summarizes, “The barbarian hordes were learning to tread timorously in the muses’ shrine.” [3]

What is art for?

William Congreve’s 1697 play, The Mourning Bride opens with this line, “Music has charms to soothe a savage beast.” A century ago in America, museum art still aimed to tame that savage (human) beast, to soothe the soul, to gentrify, to smooth away our frontier roughness. Vestiges of this reasoning linger still, and perhaps with good reason. When we think of the words like connoisseurship, erudition, sophistication, intellectualism, taste, class, and refinement, we consider them to be positive qualities, generally, although they are tinged with darker issues. Isn’t exposure to and learning about art a part of the elevating recipe in one’s character? There is a trickle-down effect from the museum that displays beautiful and extravagantly appointed rooms, such as the Metropolitan, to a woman in a small town wanting to put up curtains to make her rustic home beautiful. City life is no longer a prerequisite for such an existence. It has no exclusive on fine culture, but isn’t art required, nonetheless, to feel cultured? Maybe it’s not a question of stopping people from spitting tobacco and urinating in museums anymore, but doesn’t art still serve a civic purpose as well as a personal purpose?

And if all or any of the above is true, what are we to make of the prejudices against the profession of art, today? What is the reaction when a parent hears that a son or daughter wants to be an artist for their career? Is it more or less acceptable than any other trade? Does a young boy receive the same kind of encouragement to love art as his sister? Is a university art department given the same resources as departments across campus? Is the justification to cut art programs in schools rational and valid? These are additional questions that relate to Aesthetics, and the answers to them—even the debates about them—have lasting consequences for society. They have elements of history and criticism in them, but the definition of art brings to bear a message of its benefits, its audience, its values.

Readings on Aesthetics

William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753) full text 

David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1758) full text with forward by Eugene F. Miller 

Immanual Kant, Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft) (1790) full text translated and introduction by J. H. Bernard (1914) 

William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) full text of the essay 

Arthur Danto, “The Artworld” (1964) full text of the essay on JSTOR 

Stanley Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics” (1970) full text of the essay on JSTOR 

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977) full text 

Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) available on Amazon 

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984) available on Amazon 

Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution (2010) available on Amazon 

Share with us

Do you have books on Aesthetics that you would recommend and share with us? Send author and title, your name and the city where you like to glen@centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org

[1] Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970, p. 21.]

[2] Tomkins, p. 25

[3] Tomkins, pp. 84-85, italics added