---

From Techne to Algorithm: A Proposal for a New Taxonomy of the Arts

“Art history today must face a vexing but indisputable fact—it creates much of what it studies.”

André Chastel

by Ulises Paniagua Olivares

Certain currents in aestheticism rightly maintain that Art is, above all, a sociocultural concept in the strictest sense: a set of ideas generated under specific sociohistorical processes in which the object contemplated or communicated cannot be understood separately from the relationship the public has with the surrounding world. Philosophers such as Karel Kosík, in his Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), would endorse this claim. A work of art is in essence a mirage, a shared madness, a collective spatiotemporal idealisation, in other words, a ‘chronotopic fictional reality’ (Bakhtin, 1975). If aesthetics, understood as the perception of an object, is the mental construction of what we observe and of the feelings that are produced in us (Buraglia, 1998, p. 42), then art is the imaginary born from those who create it in a symbiotic relationship with those who contemplate it’ collective apprehending, a universe continually built and rebuilt by a community: that is art.

Yet most true works of art, that is, those which are universal, transcend and pierce layers of history. They endure across centuries, and cross-generational mirages. True works of art are timeless symbolic manifestations, and create channels of communication that extend far beyond the context of their creation. Their meaning adjusts across different eras, in accordance with semantic shifting in the culture.

However, some works of art, despite their initial relevance, gradually lose the prestige they once enjoyed. Their symbolic power (Bourdieu) vanishes under new conditions. One thinks, for example, of challenges to the rigidity of the traditional metrics in Hispanic poetry; or, to the sacred art works of Judeo-Christian culture in the course of the decline of the power of the church. For example, certain delirious and offensive works of 1960s Pop Art, examined critically, now seem like an absurd schizophrenic display irrelevant to aesthetic and social discourse.

---

Feminism and decolonial theory, together with the philosophy of liberation (Dussel, 1996) generate new approaches from their trenches. While these cannot diminish or censor a work’s historical value, they can influence the way they are appreciated now. This appreciation is fairly grounded in a discourse that questions various forms of violence and oppression. Current views require wholesale reassessments regarding: the racism of films like Gone with the Wind (1939); the derogatory comments about Mexico by the admired, though rightly criticised, Walt Whitman; the despicable behaviour of Pablo Neruda toward his daughter Malva Marina; many books inspired by Greek mythology portray gods like Poseidon as seducers when they far more closely resemble stalkers and rapists. These are polemics that invite us not to simply revisit the link between the person and the work (which can be prejudicial) but to confront the work itself and scrutinise it.

Perception of art is not static. An iconic work of a specific historical period may lack importance or validity after centuries, or even a few years; conversely, time may enhance the way we appreciate the work. El Greco’s paintings, which remained hidden for centuries in a dark basement in Toledo, astonished and inspired major twentieth-century painters. Over time art shows it has different faces, even contradictory ones, through the filter of criticism. The cosmos turns. The universe of art does too. The path is at least two millennia dating from the Hellenic influence.

---

The question of the nature of art itself remains ambiguous and is largely a matter of subjectivity. The etymology of the word Ars implies mastery or skill not necessarily limited to the skill required to produce a work that reaches sublime heights, but rather Ars refers to the skill required in any craft. Skill in the art of cooking, the art of navigation, the art of fishing. From this viewpoint, a great footballer, for the Greeks, is an artist of the pitch. Someone making and repairing bicycles is an artist. This confusion intensifies in Latin, where Ars signified skill, talent, and another set of precepts. Gaffiot, for instance, cites two texts by Titus Livius: arte Punica (“with the skill of the Carthaginians”) and the art of sacrifice: quicumque artem sacrificandi conscriptam haberet “whosoever possessed a treatise concerning sacrifices” (Thuillier, 2003, p. 21).

Doubts arise, the difference between matter and spirit, the profound decisions concerning the spiritual or intellectual depictions of reality, of matter. The Greeks had to define, at some point, which skills generated superlative emotions in order to classify them, not by distinguishing different artistic disciplines, but by making distinctions regarding the types of creative presences starting by making a distinction between the pursuit of beauty and the pursuit of utility (utilitas).

And so the Muses were born, aesthetic entities different from those we know of today. There were nine of them, including rhetoric and two types of poetry: epic and lyric. Epic poetry then was closer to narrative than it is to the verses of any contemporary author. Lyric poetry closely approximated theatre.

Incidentally, the Greeks possessed no general concept of literature. Painting, sculpture, and architecture in emphasis were not considered to be art, but craft, though the term technē served to refer to both. Meanwhile, astronomy, which today is a science, belonged to the Muse Urania and Clio was the Muse of History. The landscape of what was and was not art was different.

Authors such as Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1979) point out that in the Middle Ages aesthetic appreciation was different: there was less of a perceived difference between the artist and the artisan. In fact it is precisely in the Middle Ages that the distinction between the artist and artisan arose; the liberal arts contrast with the artes mechanicae. As a result, a great shoemaker was not recognised in the same way as great sacred art or the depiction of bucolic landscapes because the intentions behind what was made differed.

The landscape mutated again: the concept of poetry vanished, merging with song and became profane. In the Middle Ages the presence of poetry was inconceivable without the presence of music, especially the lute.

---

The evolving process of separating technical skills and procedures from artistic ones was complex and took time. It was not until the seventeenth century that André Félibien, a French architect and historian, in a letter written to the King of France, mentioned the term beaux-arts, thereby helping to institute the idea of aesthetic creation that we might define as modern. The quotation was recorded in his Entretiens of 1666. Félibien notes:

‘Seeing how Your Majesty strives to make all the fine arts flourish in France, and in particular the art of painting, it seemed to me my duty to set before the public what I had observed in this regard…’ (Félibien in Thuillier, 2003, p. 22).

From then on, critics and those who were occupied with such matters (at the dawn of the era of the modern stage) defined typologies of what they would call Art. The critics decided there would be six branches of art. First, architecture and painting were included, ushering in the neoclassical period for architecture, and a style of painting largely derived from the Flemish and Italian schools. Poetry recovered its status as an art, so that, together with narrative, it formed part of a set termed literature. This was a moment in space and time when the sonnet was born during Spain’s Golden Age, in which Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra created, through his hybridisations, a revolutionary new proposal in the universe of books. Dance and music were now accorded respect as fine artistic disciplines, while sculpture was added. For the Greeks it was not an art.

Comedy and Tragedy disappeared giving way to a new fusion called Theatre, where the aesthetic appreciations of a play by William Shakespeare, was also popular. The play’s performances were intended for the common folk despite depth of their commentary on the human condition. The Globe was the equivalent  of Old Trafford’s football theatre of dreams, a part of the entertainment that shaped the social imagination of the time.

Theatre was still not considered to be a fine art, nor was it considered so later on. The Muse of drama was swallowed up in the post-Renaissance. It is also strange that Opera, despite its pairing with Baroque music (which generates an entire universe of musical passion) was not considered to be a distinct art, given that at its core it possesses a unique set of rules and structure.

---

In the twenty-first century, film was included, the “seventh art” by Ricciotto Canudo (1911). Félibien, of course, never imagined an art that projected magically onto a giant screen using celluloid. Nor did Félibien foresee the emergence of technology as a catalyst for new creative pursuits. It was beyond his imagining, even his worst nightmares. Along the path toward film’s inclusion as a Fine Arts some major disciplines of high aesthetic value were rejected, for example photography, despite the fact that it serves as the foundation for cinematography.

Another important intersection that affected art was the emergence of electrical energy. Science becomes a spectacle of immense force. At this point, art, science and spectacle began a silent conversation questioning the rigidity of positivist philosophy. Thomas De Quincey even wrote an essay titled: On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827).

Museums were born. Galleries sprouted. The avant-garde appeared. Duchamp inaugurated the ready-made with a urinal. Today, conceptual art has reached a strange place, far from the traditional perspectives of what is considered to be art. Technique, indispensable in Renaissance workshops, recedes into the background: the artist does not touch the material with which the work is made because they commission its execution to a third party, claiming sole credit for the idea, which suffices to recognize their signature on the project. This view of creative labour is absolutely opposed to that of the ancient era. This, naturally, is tied to commercialisation, where pieces of art are not merely to the taste and at the whim of eccentric multimillionaires, but a kind of economic stock option, part of the gross domestic product, something a wealthy entrepreneur can use to secure the risk of certain banking transactions. Galleries then, begin to be led by the market. We are speaking, of course, of extremes. Nevertheless, despite intense, savage pressure from commerce, direct contact between certain artists and the materials and technologies they manipulate with skill and inventiveness still persists.

Within this landscape, past artistic imaginariums are abandoned; the present offers freshness and freedom of form and content as its assets. Tatarkiewicz (1979), following this differentiation between traditional art and twentieth, and twenty-first-century proposals for art, leads us to interpret the art of these times as ‘the reproduction of things, the construction of forms, or as experimental types of expression capable of delighting, moving, or shocking,’ unlike medieval art valued more for its technical progression and accomplishments.

In recent years the arts have seen the formation of a culture distinct from its modern and postmodern derivations. Not only have aesthetics and the very notion of the avant-garde changed (challenging formats and media) but artists’ initiatives aim now at involving large groups of people in projects that associate fiction writing and image-making practices with the occupation of local spaces and the exploration of experimental forms of socialisation.

These more unconventional artistic behaviors are multiplying, and this trend is manifest in a growing interest in public art. All this is what has helped shape a new regime in the arts, according to Jacques Rancière’s conceptualisation (2010) opening up an era of new modes of producing, conceptualising, and visualizing artistic practices. While museums, by making works of art accessible to the anonymous spectator, disrupt the logic that aligned the sensory experiences of the oppressed with their social condition; today the confusion functions differently. Art venues mount sensory displays, while information circulates through alternatives to the dominant forms, linked to broader processes related to political activism, economic modes of production and scientific research (Pérez Rubio, 2013).

---

Here is where this article pauses for reflection: if across the passage of time the nine Muses became patrons of six fine arts (with an addition made during the twentieth century) it is then legitimate, even from an academic standpoint, to reach a consensus on which disciplines constitute today’s arts. We could perhaps start by dropping the qualifier “fine” and the number seven in pursuit of a precise whole number and use an adjective better suited. The arts are more than seven. They have mutated, expanded thanks to the arrival of recent technologies and new modes of thought. What happens, then, with the arrival of new forms, in a confrontation with AI? What happens, specifically, with multi, inter, and transdisciplinary expression? How are we to name these artistic practices? We face a new paradigm.

Edgar Morin (1994), through his Theory of Complex Systems, constructed an epistemological proposal within the field of knowledge distinct from those of the nineteenth-century, which now seem anachronistic. Morin explains that an artistic discipline can blend with a scientific one. That an intersection can exist for different creative fields, and that this endows proposals with variety. Though the French author does not say what kind of variety, it is evident that the result is a level of experimentation so profound that it gives rise to eleven, twelve, thirteen, or even twenty or more New Arts (to call them by some kind of descriptor). Bachelard understood a great deal about these artistic intersections. And so, we return to the old paths, where a Renaissance painter was simultaneously an anatomist and a grave robber; a musician like Leonardo da Vinci; or a sonneteer like Michelangelo. In the era of permeability and flexibility art is forced to accept, even at an official level, the shifting paradigm.

What can be expressed is reborn in new kinds of discourse. So, the example cited above; new forms of expression involving the use of public space, the use of private space, and the use of the human body itself. The list of artistic possibilities is long and fascinating: street art, performance, body painting, urban installation, multimedia projections. We witness sophisticated or transgressive modes that are projected into the most famous (and less famous) galleries of the country and into the art arena of global capitals: arte povera, object art, conceptual art, mapping, video, animation, 3D modelling. These are recent disciplines that often achieve much in their interrelations and interpretations, and develop new aesthetic languages, even if they occasionally appear to be incomprehensible.

Gastronomy, for its part, has reached such a high level of performance, lucidly and absurdly demonstrated by the film The Menu (2022) and such aesthetic sophistication that some consider gastronomy to be an art. The same is true of fashion. To raise the question: is fashion not an activity that can be considered an art because of the high degree of skill and aestheticism involved in producing it? Arguments that deny this possibility are also valid. We live in a period of transformation, true. But this does not imply we should be herded into meekly accepting all change like sheep.

---

Criticisms regarding different manifestations of these new forms appear constantly, and with justification. We find ourselves in a century of rupture, at a crossroads of the old and the modern in the virtual, utopian/dystopian era of the future which is our present. This is a millennium of openness, not always well-received, yet a millennium also of undeniable transformation.

Thuillier (2003) expresses his discontent regarding this:

Such was the case with Conceptual Art, in which the realisation of the work was limited to a typewritten project, thereby suppressing the process of creation (until then considered essential). By contrast, Land Art required huge monuments, vast landscapes for realizations necessarily ephemeral and devoid of all thought. Installations, as cumbersome as they are boring, yet converted into an inevitable fad, generalised the Ready-Made, excluding the artist himself. Could Body Art, with its staging generally based on eroticism and sadism, form part of what had hitherto been called art? … (Thuillier, 2003, p. 18).

From this perspective, we must analyse in detail which of the new disciplines genuinely belong to art, or else abandon labels and modestly and responsibly accept only the most prominent forms, without bowing to officialdom. Aesthetics and criticism compel us to take both positions and consider them deeply, and with caution. Perhaps that is why no objective proposal has yet echoed out from within this field. How are we to define what is or is not art under these new, most novel formulations? For example, there is Bioart, also known as Transgenic Art, Bio-art, or genetic art, is a neologism that emerges properly at the beginning of the twenty-first century to designate a set of artistic practices linking art, biology and (frequently) technology.

Nevertheless we can venture to put forward a proposal with regards to these new disciplines and provide a list of what we might call the New Beaux-Arts, those fusing tradition with discovery, and arrive at a preliminary list:

Painting

Sculpture

Architecture

Music

Dance

Literature

Theatre

Film

Photography

Performance

Video

Installation

Street art

Object art

Conceptual art

Arte povera

Video installation

Mapping

Video literature

Body painting

Video theatre

Aerial dance

Jamming

Spoken word

Sound art

Bioart

Artificial intelligence

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson, Columbia University Press, 1993.

Buraglia, Pedro. “Estética urbana y participación ciudadana.” Bitácora Urbano Territorial, 1998. Instituto de Investigaciones Hábitat, Ciudad y Territorio, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Canudo, Ricciotto. “The Birth of a Sixth Art.” French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, edited by Richard Abel, Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 58–66.

Dussel, Enrique. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta, Humanities Press, 1996.

Félibien, André. Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes. 1666.

Gaffiot, Félix. Dictionnaire illustré Latin-Français. Hachette, 1934.

Kosík, Karel. Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World. Translated by Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt, D. Reidel, 1976.

Morin, Edgar. La Méthode: Tome 4, Les Idées. Seuil, 1991.

Pérez Rubio, Ana María. “Arte y política. Nuevas experiencias estéticas y producción de subjetividades.” Comunicación y Sociedad, no. 20, 2013, pp. 191–210.

Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran, Continuum, 2010.

Tatarkiewicz, Władysław. A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics. Translated by Christopher Kasparek, Martinus Nijhoff, 1980.

Thuillier, Jacques. Histoire de l’art: architecture, sculpture, peinture. Flammarion, 2003.

*Translated by Phil Hall from the article Las nuevas Bellas Artes en el siglo XXI by Ulises Paniagua Olivares 2023

---

Ulises Paniagua (Mexico, 1976) Narrator and poet. Winner of the Gabriel García Márquez International Short Story Contest, Colombia (2019). Interviewed by Silvia Lemus on the program Tratos y retratos on Canal 22 (2022). In 2023, he was interviewed in an episode of the series La ciudad es mi letra on Capital 21 TV. Featured in the anthology Puente y Precipicio in Russia (2019). Author of two novels, nine short story collections, two books of chronicles, and seven poetry collections. His work has appeared in Nocturnario, Círculo de poesía, Punto en línea, Ígitur, Nueva York Poetry, Altazor, Algarabía, and Periódico de Poesía. Published in Revista Anestesia through his column Los textos del náufrago. Director of the International Colloquium on Poetry and Philosophy (supported by FCE). Former director of the Digital Horror Collection at Editora BGR (Spain). His work has been translated into English, Russian, Greek, Serbian, Czech, and Italian. He is also Latin American editor at Ars Notoria – The Art of the Noteworthy.