04 ISSUE X
FEBRUARY 2026
FEBRUARY 2026
what is a masterpiece?
“Masterpieces” function as colonial mechanisms, linking beauty, religion, and authority to erasure and extraction, and ask who defines value, and why.
By Lauren Riley
The concept of the “masterpiece” operates as a colonial mechanism that organizes separation, erasure, and extraction, transforming political violence into aesthetic authority. European artworks are positioned as universal standards of value while simultaneously erasing and extracting from non-Western cultures. Through the formation of institutions, the control of visibility, and the removal of cultural objects from their communities, the masterpiece converts violence into legitimacy. The value of the masterpiece is not inherent but retained through the authority that language and institutions endow it with. To understand the full extent of this mechanism, this article traces the origins of the masterpiece within guild-based labor hierarchies, its transformation during the Renaissance through myths of genius and divinity, and its consolidation within art history, museums, and markets.
Image by Herbert Knosowski, via AP.
The masterpiece originates within the guild system, an association of craftsmen organized through rigid hierarchies of labor and legitimacy. Within the guild, a journeyman submitted a masterpiece as proof of skill in order to earn the title of “Master.” This title granted the right to own a workshop and to train others, establishing control over labor and visibility. The masterpiece here functioned as a mechanism of authorization, determining who could be seen, recognized, and allowed to extract labor from others. Outside of the guild, no such distinction existed, producing an erasure that excluded those not operating within the system while monopolizing the labor internally.
Linguistically, the term “master” also asserts a gendered hierarchy, embedding domination into the language of artistic value. As Linda Nochlin argues, “The very question ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ is simply the tip of an iceberg of misinterpretation.” This patriarchal structure immediately excluded women and collaborative forms of production from ever being recognized as masterpieces or capable of achieving mastery.
While the guild system confined the authority of the masterpiece within a craft economy, its underlying logic of exclusion and the extraction of labor did not disappear. Instead, this logic intensified during the Renaissance as artistic production shifted away from collective craft and toward the idea of the individual master. Craftsmen increasingly operated outside the guild and sought recognition as singular geniuses rather than members of a collective. Through this transformation, the apprentice and journeyman did not disappear but were made invisible, their labor extracted and obscured under the myth of the lone master. Nochlin again identifies this shift, writing that “the myth of the Great Artist… is itself a reflection of the conditions of a privileged, white, male elite” (Nochlin, 1971). The masterpiece could only be recognized as the product of the master, despite its reliance on collective labor, appropriated techniques, and materials sourced through colonial trade and enslavement. This shift did not eliminate extraction but instead obscured it, reframing collective and subjugated labor as the result of individual genius.
Simultaneously, European religious values were transformed into aesthetic values. As Christian institutions sponsored artistic production, Christian iconography and ideology were integrated into visual culture and presented as universal standards of beauty and value. These works were displayed as masterpieces, while other religious and cultural traditions were reduced to less than or reclassified as decorative or as of the past. Colonized religious art was frequently extracted and repurposed, its meanings stripped and appropriated to fit European aesthetic frameworks. As mastery became increasingly individualized and idealized, it became necessary to legitimize these values, a task that art history would accomplish by transforming judgment into an authoritative narrative.
Art history functions as a colonial sorting system, formalizing hierarchies of value through historical narration. Giorgio Vasari, often credited as the father of art history, established a genealogy of “great” European artists in THE LIVES OF THE MOST EXCELLENT PAINTERS, SCULPTORS, AND ARCHITECTS. By determining who could be named “most excellent,” Vasari’s work excluded Global South traditions entirely while presenting European artistic development as the image of universal progress. Techniques, forms, and materials borrowed from other cultures were reclassified as craft, artifacts, or primitive works, while European works entered museums as masterpieces. This distinction between art and artifact functions by erasing the origins of said extracted practices, diluting them and then renaming them under European authorship. By determining who could be named a great artist, art history converted colonial hierarchies into historical fact.
Once these hierarchies were established as fact, museums and markets emerged as the institutions responsible for preserving, displaying, and profiting from these classifications. In the market, masterpieces operate on scarcity and uniqueness, linking value to rarity and exclusivity. Museums replicate the function of the guild by controlling visibility, legitimacy, and access, while presenting themselves as neutral sites of preservation and education. Ariella Azoulay argues that “imperial violence is what makes the museum possible,” emphasizing that the museum’s authority depends upon histories of extraction and displacement. Museum curators continue to designate certain objects as masterpieces while denying repatriation, controlling narratives of origin and meaning. As Dan Hicks writes of the British Museum: “Retention of looted objects continues the violence of the original theft.” Erasure is thus ongoing, not historical, as museums continue to profit from colonized cultures, and invisibilize the violence inherent in these processes.
The masterpiece is therefore not merely an aesthetic category, but a colonial technology built on erasure and extraction. “Masterpieces represent what standard products are not: unique and exceptional relative to everything else,” notes Stoyan V. Sgourev and Niek Althuizen. This desire to be exceptional sustains colonial value by refusing relationality, collaboration, and abundance. To oppose the authority of the masterpiece is not to reject value entirely, but to instead give value to what the masterpiece denies. This requires a shift from mastery to relationality, from scarcity to abundance, from genius to community, and from extraction to restitution. As Walter Mignolo argues, “Decoloniality is the reconstitution of modes of being and knowing denied by modernity.” To decolonize art, therefore, is not to abandon aesthetics but to refuse the colonial terms under which aesthetic value has historically been assigned.
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