"Social activity is of its very nature artistic"

TO understand the art of a society is to understand the vital activity of that society in its most intimate and creative moments. We can learn more about mediaeval culture from a cathedral than from the most exhaustive study of constitutional law, and the churches of Ravenna are a better introduction to the Byzantine world than all the volumes of Gibbon. Hence an appreciation of art is of the first importance to the historian and the sociologist, and it is only by viewing social life itself as an artistic activity that we can understand its full meaning.

It is true that this point of view is not an obvious one for men of our age and civilization. In modern Europe Art has become a highly specialized activity entirely divorced from the practical needs of ordinary life. We are accustomed to look for Art not in the workshop and the market place, but in the galleries and private collections where the artistic achievements of different ages and cultures are collected like the bones of extinct animals in a museum. The sightseer goes to gaze on a Madonna by Rafael or a Greek statue in the same spirit that he visits the lions at the Zoo. They are something outside our daily life and they owe their value to their strangeness. Modern artistic production has been almost entirely parasitic on wealth, and the little world of the artists, the collectors, the dealers and the critics lives its own life apart from the main current of our modern civilization.

It would be a mistake to suppose, however, that this state of affairs is normal: it is the peculiar product of an exceptional society. Throughout the greater part of history the art gallery, the critic, and the collector have been unknown, though artistic production has been continuous and universal. It is in fact one of the most fundamental of human activities. It is common to the savage and the civilized man. It goes back to palaeolithic times, and it is from the artistic record of the human race that almost all that we know regarding the cultures of prehistoric times has been derived. It is indeed difficult to separate the beginnings of Art from the beginnings of human culture, for as I have said, social activity is of its very nature artistic; it is the shaping of the rough material of man’s environment by human skill and creativeness. Man has been defined as a tool-using animal, and the tool is from the beginning that of the artist no less than that of the labourer.

~Christopher Dawson: from Art and Society. (1954)

Canterbury Cathedral, UK.