bell

University teachers, as is well known, commit acts of despotism. About three years ago I committed such an act. I told my students that I would not accept papers which included the words protagonist, basic (as a noun), alienation, total (as an adjective), dichotomy, and a few others including elite and elitist. On consideration I decided to remove the ban on the last two for it seemed to me that there was no other term that could be used to discuss what is, after all, an interesting idea....

What then is elitist art? If, by this, we mean art produced by members of an elite, then we can only note that, in recent times, most of the painters and sculptors whose names we know came from some part of the middle classes, a very few from the working class, and hardly any from the aristocracy. If we look to more remote times we shall find that painters were usually members of a guild, which, in a sense, was an elitist organisation, and, going back still further, we find in primitive societies work of art sometimes produced by priests, sometimes by women, sometimes by specialised artificers, and sometimes by the whole community. But very often, in the great body of anonymous art, we do not know what the social position of the artist may have been. There is insufficient evidence to allow us to make generalisations. Art that is produced by members of an elite is not distinguishable from art that is made by the masses, so that the term can hardly be used to any purpose.

Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has writtenVirginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" (Spring 1975), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" (Summer 1979), and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'" (Winter 1979).

© 1974 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 1 (September 1974). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.

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