“Art and Significant Form”

Clive Bell

Summary of the Argument

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form — Essentialism

Bell claims that “[t]he starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion”. [2]

Bell’s Assumptions

1. Aesthetic experience is essentially private and personal.

2. “The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art” — a fact acknowledged by “all sensitive people”. [2]

The job of aesthetics is to find the one quality common to all objects that produce this kind of emotion.

Roger Fry, Portrait of Clive Bell, c. 1924

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form — Essentialism

Background

Bell’s project is not unlike Plato’s attempts to discover the essences of phenomena such as beauty, justice, knowledge, love, and truth.

Plato

Given that there are many different kinds of things that we call beautiful — beautiful songs, beautiful people, beautiful buildings, beautiful sunsets — what is it that makes all these beautiful things beautiful?

What is it about these things that justifies our calling them beautiful?

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form — Essentialism

Bell holds an essentialist view of art and follows Plato’s lead here in the search for the philosophical definition of “Art”.

Bell’s Assumption: Art has an essence.

PROBLEMS

Bell’s assumption is not necessarily true.

It’s certainly not self-evident.

In fact, it’s highly controversial.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form — Essentialism

It could just as easily be true that there are many things we call “art”, but only some of them share a common property.

Analogy

What is it that all games have in common?

Is there one thing that an activity must have in order to be called a game?

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form — Essentialism

Analogy

What is it that all works of art have in common?

Is there one thing that an object must have in order to be called art?

Unknown, Fang mask, Gabon, Unknown, Throne of Ivan the IV of Russia, mid-16th c. 19th c. Discobolus, Roman copy, 5th century BC Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1923

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form — Essentialism

Analogy

What is it that all works of art have in common?

Is there one thing that an object must have in order to be called art?

Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1921 William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Birth of Venus, 1863

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form

Significant Form

According to Bell, there must be one quality which is the essence of Art and is found in all works of art.

He calls this essential quality significant form.

But what does he mean by “significant form”?

And how do we come to experience and know this quality?

Features of Significant Form

“Lines and colors combined in a particular way” and “certain forms and relations of forms” that produce the aesthetic emotion are the features of significant form.

Problems...

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form

Problems

1. Bell says nothing about the specific nature of the lines, colors, and relations of form. 2. The way that we detect them is not by means of description but by feeling alone — the particular kind of feeling referred to as “aesthetic emotion”.

But how do we know that • a particular emotion is an aesthetic emotion and • not some other kind of feeling that we are confusing with aesthetic emotion?

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form

Problems

We can gain some insight into Bell’s view of aesthetic experience by noticing how he distinguishes aesthetic emotion from our feelings about natural beauty.

Some people may be surprised at my not having called [significant form] “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.... 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. [4, emphases added.]

Here Bell suggests that beauty is a more general phenomenon than aesthetic emotion and significant form. Natural objects can be beautiful, but they are not works of art.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form

Problems

With regard to Bell’s formalist claim — that lines and colors are the only things necessary for visual art — he’s not claiming that representational artifacts depicting objects and events cannot be works of art.

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. [8, emphases added.]

Piet Mondrian, Trees, c. 1912 Camille Pissarro, The Factory at Pontoise, 1873 Henri Matisse, Piano Lesson, 1916 Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form — The Subjectivity of Aesthetic Experience

Ontological Argument — The Defining Feature of Art

1. All works of art must have in common a defining property. 2. That property is significant form. 3. Significant form produces an aesthetic emotion in sensitive viewers. 4. Thus, all works of art have the capacity to produce an aesthetic emotion.

Epistemological Argument — Identifying a Work of Art

1. All feelings are subjective. 2. Aesthetic emotion is a feeling. 3. Aesthetic emotion is a necessary and sufficient condition for something's being a work of art. 4. Thus, the only way to identify a work of art is subjectively.

In other words, there are no objective criteria for distinguishing works of art from other kinds of objects.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Art and Significant Form — The Subjectivity of Aesthetic Experience

The appreciation of art is a matter of taste.

“We have no other means of recognizing a work of art than our feeling for it.” [Bell]

The question of taste goes back to a philosophical tradition known as empiricism and theories of moral and aesthetic judgment.