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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
The universality of a work of art is only subjectively valid. It entails that, in principle, the meaning and value of the work of art are somehow accessible to any potential consumer of aesthetic values. It does not entail the unity of many things, but rather the unity of many minds.
Georg Simmel (1882)Early sumptuary laws passed in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries protected the rights of the privileged classes to wear luxury clothing, furs, and jewels as emblems of their status and symbols of their superiority over peasants and tradesmen. The specificity of dress codes is summarized by Chandra Mukerji:
These sumptuary laws outlined the types of cloth and style of dress appropriate for each social station; they also proscribed overdressing, and restricted the use of important fabrics and decorations to the highest levels of the aristocracy.
In the same way, craft works – what we would now call art works – expressed the purity of class interests throughout the Medieval period. Until the Renaissance, Johan Huizinga observes, art had no intrinsic worth as such; it was a means by which the taste for luxury could be satisfied and was used to impress upon others the importance of one's own social station. And just as the elite depended on the products of cultural workers for symbols of status, so cultural workers depended on the elite for they alone had sufficient resources and leisure to provide support and patronage.
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