What constitutes "serious" art?

We just bought a print at a local thrift shop. It is by J. Warren Cutler, who was a scientific illustrator who worked for the National Zoo for nearly three decades.  He also did illustrations for a number of books, including children's books published by National Geographic. The print is one of a run of 300, signed by the artist and dated 1983. Relatively large, the print looks like a pen drawing of two desert foxes hunting a kangaroo rat.

The print is quite beautiful. The overall design utilizes the area of the paper well. The two foxes are looking at the rodent which is near the entrance to its nest. Each of the animals is beautifully drawn, not only showing clearly the form of the head and body but conveying the tension of the muscles and the intensity of the moment before action.

As one would hope from a scientific illustrator for the nation's zoo, the three animals appear to be anatomically correct. On the other hand, the composition is about the moment just before the life and death of the kangaroo rat will be decided, rather than about illustrating the special features of the species involved for scientific review. There is great economy in the way line has been used to indicate the shape of the animals, and the lines themselves are often quite beautiful.

I am reminded a bit of Durer's rabbit, in which the artist uses great skill to portray an animal subject. In the case of the Durer there is no doubt that we are looking at art. Yet I suspect that Mr. Cutler's print shows up in a thrift shop rather than a major gallery because that kind of art is now out of fashion. Too bad, because the print combines great knowledge of the subject and great skill with a nice artistic sensibility.

Photo of a desert fox

Kangaroo rat

The print was ridiculously cheep, and I have been unable to find examples of Cutler's prints on eBay or the Internet. His works seem to have gone out of fashion. Too bad, because this is really quite meritorious!

I have been wondering about the ways museums and art galleries deal with art. The "great museums" such as the National Gallery or the Metropolitan Museum of Art seek to show the historical evolution of art through examples from influential artists and master works. On the other hand, smaller museums often seem to focus on the work of groups of artists who worked in the region, such as New England landscapes of the paintings of the Santa Fe school. There are specialized fields such as Native American art, cowboy art, and wildlife painting. And of course there is religious art, which seems to be OK if it is old enough but does not get into galleries if it is contemporaneous.

These institutions have the effect of forming public taste, but (fortunately I think) there are commercial galleries that will deal with any class of work that finds a market. Yet somehow the curators of the public, not-for-profit institutions seem to set the standard.

There seems now, as a result of the influence of these standard setters, to be a perception that if a work is done for some purpose in addition to the expression of the artist's aesthetic impulse it is not art, and that strongly representational works done in the last century and a half are somehow less worthy as art than more abstract or expressionistic works. Fortunately, the Wyeths seem to be an exception to this trend. In my opinion, the work of Warren Cutler might merit a similar exception.