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"It is the
mark of great art that its appeal
is universal and eternal."
Note: This essay is an excerpt from the book
Art, originally published in 1914. It is in the public domain and may be
freely reproduced. Annotation links
on this page were added by Theodore Gracyk.
For the complete book, click
here.
The discussion questions have been added by Julie Van
Camp. (Copyright Julie C.Van Camp 1997) They too may be freely reproduced, so long as this complete citation is included with any such
reproductions.
Paragraph numbering below has been added to facilitate class discussion. It was not included in the original text.
[GO TO DISCUSSION QUESTIONS]
Chapter 1 What is Art?
The Aesthetic Hypothesis
#1. It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else: the literature of the subject
is not large enough for that. It is certain, however, that about no subject with which I am acquainted has so little been said that
is at all to the purpose. The explanation is discoverable. He who would elaborate a plausible theory of aesthetics must possess
two qualities - artistic sensibility and a turn for clear thinking. Without sensibility a man can have no aesthetic experience, and,
obviously, theories not based on broad and deep aesthetic experience are worthless. Only those for whom art is a constant
source of passionate emotion can possess the data from which profitable theories may be deduced; but to deduce profitable
theories even from accurate data involves a certain amount of brain-work, and, unfortunately, robust intellects and delicate
sensibilities are not inseparable. As often as not, the hardest thinkers have had no
aesthetic experience whatever. I have a friend blessed with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he takes an interest in aesthetics, has never during a life of almost forty
years been guilty of an aesthetic emotion. So, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is apt to rear
up a pyramid of irrefragable argument on the hypothesis that a handsaw is a work of art. This defect robs his perspicuous and
subtle reasoning of much of its value; for it has ever been a maxim that faultless logic can win but little credit for conclusions that
are based on premises notoriously false. Every cloud, however, has its silver lining, and this insensibility, though unlucky in that it
makes my friend incapable of choosing a sound basis for his argument, mercifully blinds him to the absurdity of his conclusions
while leaving him in full enjoyment of his masterly dialectic. People who set out from the hypothesis that
Sir Edwin Landseer
was the finest painter that ever lived will feel no uneasiness about an aesthetic which proves that
Giotto was the worst. So, my
friend, when he arrives very logically at the conclusion that a work of art should be small or round or smooth, or that to
appreciate fully a picture you should pace smartly before it or set it spinning like a top, cannot guess why I ask him whether he
has lately been to Cambridge, a place he sometimes visits.
#2. On the other hand, people who respond immediately and surely to works of art, though, in my judgment, more enviable
than men of massive intellect but slight sensibility, are often quite as incapable of talking sense about aesthetics. Their heads are
not always very clear. They possess the data on which any system must be based; but, generally, they want the power that
draws correct inferences from true data. Having received aesthetic emotions from works of art, they are in a position to seek
out the quality common to all that have moved them, but, in fact, they do nothing of the sort. I do not blame them. Why should
they bother to examine their feelings when for them to feel is enough? Why should they stop to think when they are not very
good at thinking? Why should they hunt for a common quality in all objects that move them in a particular way when they can
linger over the many delicious and peculiar charms of each as it comes? So, if they write criticism and call it esthetics, if they
imagine that they are talking about Art when they are talking about particular works of art or even about the technique of
painting, if, loving particular works they find tedious the consideration of art in general, perhaps they have chosen the better
part. If they are not curious about the nature of their emotion, nor about the quality common to all objects that provoke it, they
have my sympathy, and, as what they say if often charming and suggestive, my admiration too. Only let no one support that
what they write and talk is aesthetics; it is criticism, or just "shop."
#3. The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that
provoke this emotion we call works of art. All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.
I do not mean, of course, that all works provoke the same emotion. On the contrary, every work produces a different emotion.
But all these emotions are recognisably the same in kind; so far, at any rate, the best opinion is on my side. That there is a
particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by
pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, etc., etc., is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This
emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that
provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential
quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects.
#4. For either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of "works of art" we gibber. Everyone
speaks of "art," making a mental classification by which he distinguishes the class "works of art" from all other classes. What is
the justification of this classification? What is the quality common and peculiar to all members of this class? Whatever it be, no
doubt it is often found in company with other qualities; but they are adventitious - it is essential. There must be some one quality
without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this
quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to
St. Sophia and the windows at
Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets,
Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the
masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne?
Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each,
lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic
emotions. These relations
and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant form" is the
one quality common to all works of visual art.
#5. At this point it may be objected that I am making aesthetics a purely subjective business, since my only data are personal
experiences of a particular emotion. It will be said that the objects that provoke this emotion vary with each individual, and that
therefore a system of aesthetics can have no objective validity. It must be replied that any system of aesthetics which pretends
to be based on some objective truth is so palpably ridiculous as not to be worth discussing. We have no other means of
recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion vary with each individual. Aesthetic
judgments are, as the saying goes, matters of taste; and about tastes, as everyone is proud to admit, there is no disputing. A
good critic may be able to make me see in a picture that had left me cold things that I had overlooked, till at last, receiving the
aesthetic emotion, I recognise it as a work of art. To be continually pointing out those parts, the sum, or rather the combination,
of which unite to produce significant form, is the function of criticism. But it is useless for a critic to tell me that something is a
work of art; he must make me feel it for myself. This he can do only by making me see; he must get at my emotions through my
eyes. Unless he can make me see something that moves me, he cannot force my emotions. I have no right to consider anything
a work of art to which I cannot react emotionally; and I have no right to look for the essential quality in anything that I have not
felt to be a work of art. The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of
aesthetics must be based on personal experience - that is to say, they must be subjective.
#6. Yet, though all aesthetic theories must be based on aesthetic judgments, and ultimately all aesthetic judgments must be
matters of personal taste, it would be rash to assert that no theory of aesthetics can have general validity. For, though A, B, C,
D are the works that move me, and A, D, E, F the works that move you, it may well be that x is the only quality believed by
either of us to be common to all the works in his list. We may all agree about aesthetics, and yet differ about particular works of
art. We may differ as to the presence or absence of the quality x. My immediate object will be to show that significant form is
the only quality common and peculiar to all the works of visual art that move me; and I will ask those whose aesthetic
experience does not tally with mine to see whether this quality is not also, in their judgment, common to all works that move
them, and whether they can discover any other quality of which the same can be said.
#7. Also at this point a query arises, irrelevant indeed, but hardly to be suppressed: "Why are we so profoundly moved by
forms related in a particular way?" The question is extremely interesting, but irrelevant to aesthetics. In pure aesthetics we have
only to consider our emotion and its object: for the purposes of aesthetics
we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to
pry behind the object into the state of mind of him who made it. Later, I shall attempt to answer the question; for by so doing I
may be able to develop my theory of the relation of art to life. I shall not, however, be under the delusion that I am rounding off
my theory of aesthetics. For a discussion of aesthetics, it need be agreed only that forms arranged and combined
according to
certain unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way, and that it is the business of an artist so to combine and
arrange them that they shall move us. These moving combinations and arrangements I have called, for the sake of convenience
and for a reason that will appear later, "Significant Form."
#8. A third interpretation has to be met. "Are you forgetting about colour?" someone inquires. Certainly not; my term
"significant form" included combinations of lines and of colours. The distinction between form and colour is an unreal one; you
cannot conceive a colourless line or a colourless space; neither can you conceive a formless relation of colours. In a black and
white drawing the spaces are all white and all are bounded by black lines; in most oil paintings the spaces are
multi-coloured and so are the boundaries; you cannot imagine a boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary lines.
Therefore, when I speak of significant form, I mean a combination of lines and colours (counting white and black as
colours) that moves me aesthetically.
#9. Some people may be surprised at my not having called this "beauty." Of course, to those who define beauty as
"combinations of lines and colours that provoke aesthetic emotion," I willingly conceded the right of substituting their word for
mine. But most of us, however strict we may be, are apt to apply the epithet "beautiful" to objects that do not provoke that
peculiar emotion produced by works of art. Everyone, I suspect, has called a butterfly or a flower beautiful. Does anyone feel
the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture/ surely, it is not what I call an
aesthetic emotion that most of us feel, generally, for natural beauty. I shall suggest, later, that some people may, occasionally,
see in nature what we see in art, and feel for her an aesthetic emotion; but I am satisfied that, as a rule, most people feel a very
different kind of emotion for birds and flowers and the wings of butterflies from that which they feel for pictures, pots, temples
and statues. Why these beautiful things do not move us as works of art move us is another, and not an aesthetic, question. For
our immediate purpose we have to discover only what quality is common to objects that do move us as works of art. In the last
part of this chapter, when I try to answer the question-"Why are we so profoundly moved by some combinations of lines and
colours?" I shall hope to offer an acceptable explanation of why we are less profoundly moved by others.
#10. Since we call a quality that does not raise the characteristic aesthetic emotion "Beauty," it would be misleading to call by
the same name the quality that does. To make "beauty" the object of the aesthetic emotion, we must give to the word an
over-strict and unfamiliar definition. Everyone sometimes uses "beauty" in an unaesthetic sense; most people habitually do so.
To everyone, except perhaps here and there an occasional aesthete, the commonest sense of the word is unaesthetic. Of its
grosser abuse, patent in our chatter about "beautiful huntin'" and "beautiful shootin'," I need not take account; it would be open
to the precious to reply that they never do so abuse it. Besides, here there is no danger of confusion between the aesthetic and
the non-aesthetic use; but when we speak of a beautiful woman there is. When an ordinary man speaks of a beautiful woman
he certainly does not mean only that she moves him aesthetically; but when an artist calls a withered old hag beautiful he may
sometimes mean what he means when he calls a battered torso beautiful. The ordinary man, if he be also a man of taste, will call
the battered torso beautiful, but he will not call a withered hag beautiful because, in the matter of women, it is not to the
aesthetic quality that the hag may possess, but to some other quality that he assigns the epithet. Indeed, most of us never dream
of going for aesthetic emotions to human beings, from whom we ask something very different. This "something," when we find it
in a young woman, we are apt to call 'beauty.' We live in a nice age. With the man-in-the-street 'beautiful" is more often than
not synonymous with "desirable": the word does not necessarily connote any aesthetic reaction whatever, and I am tempted to
believe that in the minds of many the sexual flavour of the word is stronger than the aesthetic. I have noticed a consistency in
those to whom the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful woman, and the next most beautiful thing a picture of one. The
confusion between aesthetic and sensual beauty is not in their case so great as might be supposed. Perhaps there is none; for
perhaps they have never had an aesthetic emotion to confuse with their other emotions. The art that they call "beautiful" is
generally closely related to the women. A beautiful picture is a photograph of a pretty girl; beautiful music, the music that
provokes emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces; and beautiful poetry, the poetry that recalls the
same emotions felt, twenty years earlier, for the rector's daughter. Clearly the word 'beauty" is used to connote the objects of
quite distinguishable emotions, and that is a reason for not employing a term which would land me inevitably in confusions and
misunderstandings with my readers.
#11. On the other hand, with those who judge it more exact to call these combinations and arrangements of form that provoke
our aesthetic emotions, not "significant form," but "significant relations of form," and then try to make the best of two worlds, the
aesthetic and the metaphysical, by calling these relations "rhythm," I have no quarrel whatever. Having made it clear that by
"significant form" I mean arrangements and combinations that move us in a particular way, I willingly join hands with those who
prefer to give a different name to the same thing.
#12. The hypothesis that significant form is the essential quality in a work of art has at least one merit denied to many more
famous and more striking - it does help to explain things. We are all familiar with pictures that interest us and excite our
admiration, but do not move us as works of art. To this class belongs what I call "Descriptive Painting" that is, painting in which
forms are used not as objects of emotion, but as means of suggesting emotion or conveying information. Portraits of
psychological and historical value, topographical works, pictures that tell stories and suggest situations, illustrations of all sorts,
belong to this class. That we all recognise the distinction is clear, for who has not said that such and such a drawing was
excellent as illustration, but as a work of art worthless? Of course many descriptive pictures possess, amongst other qualities,
formal significance, and are therefore works of art; but many more do not. They interest us; they may move us too in a hundred
different ways, but they do not move us aesthetically. According to my hypothesis they are not works of art. They leave
untouched our aesthetic emotions because it is not their forms but the ideas or information suggested or conveyed by their
forms that affect us.
#13. Few pictures are better known or liked that Frith's
"Paddington Station"; certainly I should be the last to grudge it its
popularity. Many a weary forty minutes have I whiled away disentangling its fascinating incidents and forging for each an
imaginary past and an improbable future. But certain though it is that Frith's masterpiece, or engravings of it, have provided
thousands with half-hours of curious and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no one has experienced before it one
half-second of aesthetic rapture - and this although the picture contains several pretty passages of colour, and is by no means
badly painted. "Paddington Station" is not a work of art; it is an interesting and amusing document. In it line and colour are used
to recount anecdotes, suggest ideas, and indicate the manners and customs of an age; they are not used to provoke aesthetic
emotion. Forms and the relations of forms were for Frith not objects of emotion, but means of suggesting emotion and
conveying ideas.
#14. The ideas and information conveyed by "Paddington Station" are so amusing and so well presented that the picture has
considerable value and is well, worth preserving. But, with the perfection of photographic processes and of the cinematograph,
pictures of this sort are becoming otiose. Who doubts that one of those daily Mirror photographers in collaboration with a Daily
mail reporter can tell us far more about "London day by day" than any royal Academician? For an account of manners and
fashions we shall go, in future, to photographs, supported by a little bright journalism, rather than to descriptive painting.
Had
the imperial academicians of Nero, instead of manufacturing incredibly loathsome imitations of the antique, recorded in fresco
and mosaic the manners and fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish, would now be an historical gold-mine. If
only they had been Friths instead of being Alma
Tademas! But photography has made impossible any such transmutation of
modern rubbish. Therefore it must be confessed that pictures in the Frith tradition are grown superfluous; they merely waste the
hours of able men who might be more profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence. Still, they are not unpleasant,
which is more than can be said for that kind of descriptive painting of which
"The doctor" is the most flagrant example. Of
course "The doctor" is not a work of art. In it form is not used as an object of emotion, but as a means of suggesting emotions.
This alone suffices to make it nugatory; it is worse than nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false. What it suggests is not
pity and admiration but a sense of complacency in our own
pitifulness and generosity. It is sentimental. Art is above morals, or,
rather, all art is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works of art are immediate means to good. Once we have judged
a thing a work of art, we have judged it ethically of the first importance and put it beyond the reach of the
moralist. But
descriptive pictures which are not works of art, and, therefore, are not necessarily means to good states of mind, are proper
objects of the ethical philosopher's attention. Not being a work of art, "The Doctor" has none of the immense ethical value
possessed by all objects that provoke aesthetic ecstasy; and the state of mind to which it is a means, as illustration, appears to
me undesirable.
#15. The works of those enterprising young men, the Italian
futurists, are notable examples of descriptive painting. Like the
Royal Academicians, they use form, not to provoke aesthetic emotions, but to convey information and ideas. Indeed
the
published theories of the Futurists prove that their pictures ought to have nothing whatever to do with art. Their social and
political theories are respectable, but I would suggest to young Italian painters that it is possible to become a Futurist in thought
and action and yet remain an artist, if one has the luck to be born one. To associate art with politics is always a mistake.
Futurist pictures are descriptive because they aim at presenting in line and colour the chaos of the mind at a particular moment;
their forms are not intended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information. These forms, by the way, whatever may
be the nature of the ideas they suggest, are themselves anything but revolutionary. In such futurist pictures as I have seen -
perhaps I should except some by Severine - the drawing, whenever it becomes representative as it frequently does, is found to
be in that soft and common convention brought into fashion by Besnard some thirty years ago, and much affected by Beaux-Art
students ever since. As works of art, the Futurist pictures are negligible; but they are not to be judged as works of art. A good
Futurist picture would succeed as a good piece of psychology succeeds; it would reveal, through line and
colour, the complexities of an interesting state of mind. If futurist pictures seem to fail, we must seek an explanation, not in a lack of artistic
qualities that they never were intended to possess, but rather in the minds the states of which they are intended to reveal.
#16. Most people who care much about art find that of the work that moves them most the greater part is
what scholars call "Primitive." Of course there are bad primitives. For instance, I remember going, full of enthusiasm, to see one of the earliest
Romanesque churches in Poitiers (Notre-Dame-la-Grande), and finding it as ill-proportioned, over-decorated, coarse, fat and
heavy as any better class building by one of those highly civilised architects who flourished a thousand years earlier or eight
hundred later. But such exceptions are rare. As a rule primitive art is good - and here again my hypothesis is helpful - for, as a
rule, it is also free from descriptive qualities. In primitive art you will find no accurate
representation; you will find only
significant form. Yet no other art moves us so profoundly. Whether we consider
Sumerian sculpture or pre-dynastic Egyptian
art, or archaic Greek, or the Wei and
T'ang masterpieces, or those early Japanese works of which I had the luck to see a few
superb examples (especially two wooden
Bodhisattvas) at the Shepherd's bush Exhibition in 1910, or whether, coming nearer
home, we consider the primitive Byzantine art of the sixth century and its primitive developments amongst the western
barbarians, or, turning far afield, we consider that mysterious and majestic
art that flourished in Central and South America
before the coming of the white men, in every case we observe three common characteristics - absence of representation,
absence of technical swagger, sublimely impressive form. Nor is it hard to discover the connection between these three. Formal
significance loses itself in preoccupation with exact representation and ostentatious cunning.
#17. Naturally, it is said that if there is little representation and less saltimbancery in primitive art, that is because the primitives
were unable to catch a likeness or cut intellectual capers. The contention is beside the point. There is truth in it, no doubt,
though, were I a critic whose reputation depended on a power of impressing the public with a semblance of knowledge, I
should be more cautious about urging it than such people generally are. For to support that the Byzantine masters wanted skill,
or could not have created an illusion had they wished to do so, seems to imply ignorance of the amazingly dexterous realism of
the notoriously bad works of that age. Very often, I fear, the misrepresentation of the primitives must be attributed to what the
critics call, "wilful distortion." Be that as it may, the point is that, either from what of skill or want of will, primitives neither create
illusions, nor make display of extravagant accomplishment, but concentrate their energies on the one thing needful - the creation
of form. Thus have they created the finest works of art that we possess.
#18. Let no one imagine that representation is bad in itself; a realistic form may be as significant, in its place as part of the
design, as an abstract. But if a representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. The representative element in a
work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing
from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's
activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories
are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I
take to be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between
them and the lives of men, but springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes,
whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic
emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do,
it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it
has provoked much emotion. We seem to have recognised intellectually the rightness of its forms without staying to fix our
attention, and collect, as it were, their emotional significance. If this were so, it would be permissible to inquire whether it was
the forms themselves or our perception of their rightness and necessity that caused aesthetic emotion. But I do not think I need
linger to discuss the matter here. I have been inquiring why certain combinations of forms move us; I should not have traveled
by other roads had I enquired, instead, why certain combinations are perceived to be right and necessary, and why our
perception of their rightness and necessity is moving. What I have to say is this: the rapt philosopher, and he who contemplates
a work of art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its own; that significance is unrelated to the significance
of life. In this world the emotions of life find no place. It is a world with emotions of its own.
#19. To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of
three-dimensional space. That bit of knowledge, I admit, is essential to the appreciation of many great works, since many of the
move moving forms ever created are in three dimensions. To see a cube or rhomboid as a flat pattern is to lower its
significance, and a sense of three-dimensional space is essential to the full appreciation of most architectural forms. Pictures
which would be insignificant if we saw them as flat patterns are profoundly moving because, in fact, we see them as related
planes. If the representation of three-dimensional space is to be called "representation," then I agree that there is one kind of
representation which is not irrelevant. Also, I agree that along with our feeling for line and colour we must bring with us our
knowledge of space if we are to make the most of every kind of form. Nevertheless, there are magnificent designs to an
appreciation of which this knowledge is not necessary: so, though it is not irrelevant to the appreciation of some works of art it
is not essential to the appreciation of all. What we must say is that the representation of three-dimensional space is neither
irrelevant nor essential to all art, and that every other sort of representation is irrelevant.
#20. That there is an irrelevant representative or descriptive element in many great works of art is not in the least surprising.
Why it is not surprising I shall try to show elsewhere. Representation is not of necessity baneful, and highly realistic forms may
be extremely significant. Very often, however, representation is a sign of weakness in an artist. A painter too feeble to create
forms that provoke more than a little aesthetic emotion will try to eke that little out by suggesting the emotions of life. To evoke
the emotions of life he must use representation. Thus a man will paint an execution, and, fearing to miss with his first barrel of
significant form, will try to hit with his second by raising an emotion of fear or pity. But if in the artist an inclination to play upon
the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of
life is a sign of defective sensibility always. It means that his aesthetic emotions are weak or, at any rate, imperfect. Before a
work of art people who feel little or no emotion for pure form find themselves at a loss. They are deaf men at a concert. They
know that they are in the presence of something great, but they lack the power of apprehending it. They know that they ought
to feel for it a tremendous emotion, but it happens that the particular kind of emotion it can raise is one that they can feel hardly
or not at all. And so they read into the forms of the work those facts and ideas for which they are capable of feeling emotion,
and feel for them the emotions that they can feel -the ordinary emotions of life. When confronted by a picture, instinctively they
refer back its forms to the world from which they came. They treat created form as though it were imitated form, a picture as
though it were a photograph. Instead of going out on the stream of art into a new world of aesthetic experience, they turn a
sharp corner and come straight home to the world of human interests. For them the significance of a work of art depends on
what they bring to it; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old material is stirred. A good work of visual art carries a
person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy: to use art as a means to the emotions of life is to use a telescope
of reading the news. You will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their subjects;
whereas people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the
representative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities of
colours. Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or not a man is a good artist. They are concerned only with
lines and colours, their relations and quantities and qualities; but from these they win an emotion more profound and far more
sublime than any that can be given by the description of facts and ideas.
#21. This last sentence has a very confident ring - over-confident, some may think. Perhaps I shall be able to justify it, and
make my meaning clearer too, if I give an account of my own feelings about music. I am not really musical. I do not understand
music well. I find musical form exceedingly difficult to apprehend, and I am sure that the profounder subtleties of harmony and
rhythm more often than not escape me. The form of a musical composition must be simple indeed if I am to grasp it honestly.
My opinion about music is not worth having. Yet, sometimes, at a concern, though my appreciation of the music is limited and
humble, it is pure. Sometimes, though I have poor understanding, I have a clean palate. Consequently, when I am feeling bright
and clear and intent, at the beginning of a concert for instance, when something that I can grasp is being played, I get from
music that pure aesthetic emotion that I get from visual art. It is less intense, and the rapture is evanescent; I understand music
too ill for music to transport me far into the world of pure aesthetic ecstasy. But at moments I do appreciate music as pure
musical form, as sounds combined according to the laws of a mysterious necessity, as pure art with a tremendous significance
of its own and no relation whatever to the significance of life; and in those moments I lose myself in that infinitely sublime state of
mind to which pure visual form transports me. How inferior is my normal state of mind at a concern. Tired or perplexed, I let
slip my sense of form, my aesthetic emotion collapses, and I begin weaving into the harmonies, that I cannot grasp, the ideas of
life. Incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and
mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling. At such times, were
the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation - the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the
laughing of demons - to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. Very likely I should be pleased; they would
afford new points of departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know very well what has happened. I have
been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. I have been cutting blocks with a razor. I
have tumbled from the superb
peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity. It is a jolly country. No one
need to ashamed of enjoying himself there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little crestfallen in
the cosy valleys. And let no one imagine, because the has made merry in the warm
tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he
can even guess at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art.
#22. About music most people are as willing to be humble as I am. If they cannot grasp musical form and win from it a pure
aesthetic emotion, they confess that they understand music imperfectly or not at all. They recognize quite clearly that there is a
difference between the feeling of the musician for pure music and that of the cheerful concert-goer for what music suggests. The
latter enjoys his own emotions, as he has every right to do, and recognises their inferiority. Unfortunately, people are apt to be
less modest about their powers of appreciating visual art. Everyone is inclined to believe that out of pictures, at any rate, he can
get all that there is to be got; everyone is ready to cry "humbug" and "imposter" at those who say that more can be had. The
good faith of people who feel pure aesthetic emotions is called in question by those who have never felt anything of the sort. It
is the prevalence of the representative element, I support. That makes the man in the street so sure that he knows a good
picture when he sees one. For I have noticed that in matters of architecture, pottery, textiles, etc., ignorance and ineptitude are
more willing to defer to the opinions of those who have been blest with peculiar sensibility. It is a pity that cultivated and
intelligent men and women cannot be induced to believe that a great gift of aesthetic appreciation is at least as rare in visual as in
musical art. A comparison of my own experience in both has enabled me to discriminate very clearly between pure and impure
appreciation. Is it too much to ask that others should be as honest about their feelings for pictures as I have been about mine for
music? For I am certain that most of those who visit galleries do feel very much what
I feel at concerts. They have their moments of pure ecstasy; but the moments are short and unsure. Soon they fall back into the world of human interests and feel
emotions, good no doubt, but inferior. I do not dream of saying that what they get from art is bad or nugatory; I say that they
do not get the best that art can give. I do not say that they cannot understand art; rather I say that they cannot understand the
state of mind of those who understand it best. I do not say that art means nothing or little to them; I say they miss its full
significance. I do not suggest for one moment that their appreciation of art is a thing to be ashamed of; the majority of the
charming and intelligent people with whom I am acquainted appreciate visual art impurely; and, by the way, the appreciation of
almost all great writers has been impure. But provided that there be some fraction of pure aesthetic emotion, even a mixed and
minor appreciation of art is, I am sure, one of the most valuable things in the world - so valuable, indeed, that in my giddier
moments I have been tempted to believe that art might prove the world's salvation.
#23. Yet, though the echoes and shadows of art enrich the life of the plains, her spirit dwells on the mountains. To him who
woos, but woos impurely, she returns enriched what is brought. Like the sun, she warms the good seed in good soil and causes
it to bring forth good fruit. But only to the perfect lover does she give a new strange gift - a gift beyond all price. Imperfect
lovers bring to art and take away the ideas and emotions of their own age and civilisation. In twelfth-century Europe a man
might have been greatly moved by a Romanesque church and found nothing in a T'ang picture. To a man of a later age, Greek
sculpture meant much and Mexican nothing, for only to the former could he bring a crowd of associated ideas to be the objects
of familiar emotions. But the perfect lover, he who can feel the profound significance of form, is raised above the accidents of
time and place. To him the problems of archaeology, history, and hagiography are impertinent. If the forms of a work are
significant its provenance is irrelevant. Before the grandeur of those Sumerian figures in
the Louvre he is carried on the same
flood of emotion to the same aesthetic ecstasy as, more than four thousand years ago, the
Chaldean lover was carried. It is the
mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal. Significant form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic
emotion in anyone capable of feeling it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats; men change their institutions and their
customs as they change their coats; the intellectual triumphs of one age are the follies of another; only great art remains stable
and unobscure. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place,
because its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what does it matter
whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago? The forms
of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
The discussion questions have been added by Julie Van
Camp. (Copyright Julie C.Van Camp 1997) They
may be freely reproduced, so long as this complete citation is included with any such
reproductions.
1. In #1, Bell claims that both "artistic sensibility" and "clear thinking" are needed to develop an aesthetic theory. He
ridicules people, lacking in the former, who think "Sir Edwin Landseer was the finest painter that ever lived." Look at
Landseer's work by clicking
here. On what basis could someone think that Landseer was a fine
painter? Do you agree with Bell that such a person would be lacking in "artistic sensibility," "deep aesthetic experience,"
and "delicate sensibilities"? On what basis might such a person defend such praise of
Landseer? 2. In #2, Bell also criticizes those who have artistic sensibility, but lack the intellectual ability to consider art in general. Such
persons write criticism, but cannot think aesthetically. Does this seem to be a useful distinction between criticism and
philosophy? Does it account for your understanding of the difference between critics and philosophers?
3. In #3, Bell begins his quest for an "essence" of art. He claims that "all sensitive
people" agree that art provokes an "aesthetic emotion." What does he seem to mean by "aesthetic emotion"? Who are the "sensitive people" he is talking
about? Is this claim consistent with your own experience of art?
4. Bell claims in #4 that there must be an "essence" of art. What are his arguments to support this claim that art must have
an "essence"? He then goes on to look at a wide range of examples of things we already consider art and claims that they
all share "significant form," which he concludes is the "essence" of art. How does he define "significant form"? Use the
"find" command to look for the other passages using "significant form" in this text. Try to frame a specific definition with
which he would agree.
5. Look at some of the examples he considers in #4 by clicking the hyperlinks in the text of this paragraph. Do they all
seem to share an "essence"? Does that "essence" seem to be appropriately characterized as "significant form"? Is there
some other basis upon which we consider all of those examples "art"?
6. In #5, he anticipates a criticism from someone who believes that all aesthetic judgments are "subjective." Summarize the
arguments of this subjectivist, as Bell as presented them.
7. Bell responds to the subjectivist criticism in #6, claiming that aesthetic judgments have "general validity." How does he
explain disagreements that we have about art? I.e., how does he defend the "general validity" of aesthetic judgments,
while still accounting for disagreements that we seem to have? Is his response to the subjectivist satisfactory? What role
does "significant form" play in his argument here?
8.The proper focus of aesthetics is "Significant Form," according to Bell in #7. The intentions of the artist are irrelevant, as
is emphasis on the psychological state of the observer. Is his narrow focus here convincing? Does it provide a useful way
to clarify aesthetic inquiry? Is it too narrow?
9. How does Bell include a role for color in his theory of "significant form"? (#8)
10. Bells rejects calling the "essence" of art "beauty," preferring "significant form." What is his reasoning for rejecting the term
"beauty"? How persuasive is his reasoning here? (#9 & #10)
11. Bell defends his theory of "significant form" by arguing that it "explains things" - i.e., that it has explanatory power.
Consider his examples in #12 and #13. Does his theory explain things adequately?
12. He claims that "descriptive painting" might be art, but often is not. (#13 & #14) He seems here to reject a traditional
theory of art as "representation." If "descriptive paintings" do not excite an "aesthetic emotion," what do they do,
according to Bell? Why do some "descriptive paintings" also function as "art," for Bell? Also consider his discussions of
"representation" in #18 and #20. How is it possible for some representative art to have value as art? What is wrong with
most representation in art?
13. Bell considers examples of "Paddington Station" and the work of Italian futurists (#13-#15). He denies that they are "art"
under his definition, yet finds value in them. If they are not art, what are they? Precisely what value do they have to Bell?
14. Bell praises most "Primitive Art" in #16 and #17. What does he find praiseworthy in this art? He gives an example of
"bad" primitive art, the Notre-Dame-la-Grande at Poitiers. Click here and here to see this what it looks like. Why does
he seem to dislike this architecture?
15. What do we need to know to appreciate a work of art? (#19) What role does our knowledge of three-dimensional
space play in this understanding, according to Bell?
16. Bell distinguishes "aesthetic emotion" and "the ordinary emotions of life" (#20). What are those differences? Is this
account consistent with your own experience of art? . . . Bell supports his
distinction by appealing to his own experience of music (#21 & #22). Does his account offer a satisfactory explanation
of an artform with which you are not familiar? Do you fall into the same trap Bell describes when he experiences music?
What is the difference between "pure" and "impure" appreciation? (#22)
17. Bell offers a test for "great art" as that which stands the test of time (#23). Has he provided a persuasive argument in
support of that view?
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