It was in the 18th century that the notion of the arts or high art separated from lower, mechanical activities & trade. Poetry, music, painting, sculpture, all dated back to antiquity – but the idea of linking them all into a new category, a separate field of investigation, as done by philosophical pioneers by Kant or Burke, was an 18th century innovation.
The word ‘aesthetics’ was coined in the 1750s – a new area of philosophical study.
The figure of the connoisseur (French) appears, supported by the concept of ‘taste’ and ‘good taste’, separate from the king & aristocracy, the previous sole guardians of taste.
Similarly, the figure of the impresario (Italian) – the middleman, the artistic manager, art dealers, printers & engravers, a Europe-wide network of people feeding the growing demand for ‘art’ from a newly affluent middle class.
David Hume & Adam Smith associated the civilising arts with the influence of commerce in bringing together remote people in a common cause. 18th century polite society was urban – a thing of coffee shops and salons and exchanges and assembly rooms and dining clubs and reading societies – where a wide range of people could meet and debate – no longer with courts.
Critics & sociologists, by defining polite, commercial, refined & tasteful society, also created their opposite, the vulgar, peasant cultures of, for example, the Scottish Highlands – or the backward savage cultures of America & Tahiti. Only later in the century did intellectuals begin to hanker after the folk traditions, stories, poems, legends, songs which had allegedly been expunged by the spread of civilisation – the origins, for example, of the taste for ‘the Celtic’, as explained in the British Museum exhibition Celts: Art and Identity – which also became a component of the Romantic Movement.
The King and Court
After the Civil War no monarch had the money or could get it off Parliament to realise the kind of extravagant building plans executed on the Continent by, for example Louis XVI (Versailles). Charles II couldn’t afford Christopher Wren’s grand plans to rebuild Whitehall, James II didn’t have the time, William III was sour & anti-social, preferring his palaces in Holland, though he grubbed the money to pay for Wren to refurbish Hampton Court. The Georges were foreign and so didn’t want to waste money on English palaces.
First half of the 18th century: The Kit-Kat Club (1696-1720) symbolises the move from Court – royal patronage & libertinage – to the ideals of a civilised society of polite gentlemen, as described in the new Tatler and Spectator magazines. Members; Addison, Steele et al.
Second half of 18th century: Dr Johnson’s Literary Club (1764-94): Johnson, Garrick, Reynolds, Burke.
Polite society
Politeness as a cure for the severe stresses left by the Civil War: politeness more important than ideology or creed: politeness ensuring tolerance & peace. As promoted in the hugely influential Spectator and Tatler.
Books & Boots 