How to do things with style: A pragmatic history of style as a site for debates about authorship, commodification and technological reproducibility

While students desperately ask how to find it, educators deem it superficial; at times, a sign of artistic personality, it simultaneously indexes market niches; individual property of the artist, it also is not protected by copyright laws. Style is a rich concept whose impact on creatives is only mirrored by the lack of research on it. This paper investigates the history not of different styles but of style as a semiotic device through three key historical moments. From its role in the constitution of authorship in the eighteenth century to The Great Depression aesthetic changes to today’s theft of stylistic labour by artificial intelligence, this article suggests that style, the visual manifestation of the indexical relationship between artists and their work, has long been a tool for creatives to manifest, control and benefit from their work. The meaning and role of style for artists have changed over the centuries, from sign of the intrinsic personhood of an author to superficial sign of commercialism. This pragmatic history of style sheds light on two blind spots. On the one hand, an ethnographic blind spot was created by the illustrators themselves in their ‘theoretical turn’, leaving style to mere commercialism and framing it as the antithesis of artistry. On the other hand, the paper addresses a theoretical blind spot of history of art that has for a long time focused on style as a normative category to be defined and refined (cf. the works of Gombrich, Shapiro, Arnheim, Panofsky, Kubler, etc.) and left under theorized the pragmatics of style, i.e. what people do with the concept to control and regulate the social life of artworks.