The Art of Civilization

This book tells the story of how art since ancient Greece is inextricably linked to a particular place and social group: the city and its homegrown species, the bourgeois. Despite the fact that it has glorified the crown and the cross for most of its history; despite its mystical, lofty, or subversive aura; despite its oft-professed scorn of the down-to-earth bourgeoisie, in truth art has always been the product of craft and labor. As such it bears the imprint of the workshop and the independent mentality of producers. Breaking with a misty-eyed romantic view of art, The Art of Civilization shows how artistic expression in Western societies has helped the rise of a demystified and pragmatic mindset. Art indeed has civilized us, laying the groundwork for the historical victory of brain over brawn, of reason over mystique, and of productive bourgeois ways over the transcendental.

Didier Maleuvre is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He is the author of Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (1999), The Religion of Reality: Inquiry into the Self, Art, and Transcendence (2006), and The Horizon: A History of our Infinite Longing (2011).

Introduction.- 1 Birth of the Aesthetic.- 2 The Time of Images.- 3 Into the Time of Art.- 4 The Time of Makers.- 5 The Time of Work.- 6 The Time of Knowledge.- 7 The Time of Taste.- 8 The Time of Ideologies.- 9 The Time of Production.- 10 Triumph of the Aesthetic.