Subvert the official authority

During the Italian Renaissance, a loose coalition of artists, critics, and churchmen established what we now call the beaux-arts tradition by appropriating and wilfully misconstruing sacred masterworks as objects of private desire. The beaux-arts, a French term corresponding to fine arts in English, generalised the concept of beauty for beauty’s sake (or art for art’s sake, and here fashion for fashion’s sake). “They created what Francis Haskell refers to as ‘a category of art for which only aesthetic quality need to be taken into account’ — which is not really a category of art at all but a categorical way of looking at art that privileges the quality of the object’s consequence over the authority of its causes,” Hickey explains. Over time, it became increasingly possible — even legitimate — for everyday people to subvert the official authority of clerics, bureaucrats, and academics who were assigned the difficult task of determining the “real” value, uncovering the “true” meaning, and enforcing the “correct” interpretation of art. “Being able to say ‘well isn’t that pretty’ is no small thing.”

H/T - seen in the final print edition of Men In This Town https://www.meninthistown.com/