By ‘the spectrum of the arts’, Monaco is referring to the everchanging definition of what ‘art’ is – in the constant cycle of new ideas, methods, and styles being considered art, widening the spectrum, and then being factored away as part of something else and no longer considered an art, honing the definition of ‘art’ back down once more. These cores were originally history, comedy, tragedy, poetry, dance, astronomy, and music.
For example: over time, poetry branched off into lyric, dramatic and epic poetry, forming the subgroup ‘literary arts’ along with history, comedy, and tragedy. From here grew the need of structure, rules for these arts; grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all made so that it became simpler to categorize. As mathematics became more and more important, geometry replaced dance.
Further along in time, the lines between ‘art’ and ‘method’ slowly blurred, and the two melted together, to mean ‘skill’. If you were especially good at something, you had mastered the ‘art’ of it. But then, the definition started to head back to its original size– painting and creation, the ‘fine arts’ became closely linked to and eventually synonymous with ‘art’ itself, whilst the more structured, logic driven ‘arts’ like sciences and mathematics were slowly being removed. Art was no longer skill, it was creation.
This is just one example of the cycle of what is considered part of the spectrum of art, fluctuating as humanity develops, viewpoints change, and new technologies and means of expression are invented. Art is a ‘spectrum’ because it can’t and never will be defined – this is because art is relative to humanity, and we cannot be wholly confined to a definition either.
