To escape from the anxieties of the times I've been on an art kick. My eyes are pretty bad but I can make out the general form of a painting and can read material that's presented in certain ways, so I've been able for the most part to collect information on the subject. I've collected enough by now for a small book but I'm not going to write a small book and I don't even want to write a long post. I'd just like to sketch out the framework of my thoughts about art from what i've been reading and looking at and thinking about.
It's pretty simple once I get it boiled down. What I want from art is the aesthetic emotion Clive Bell wrote about as the essence of art. I want to be blown away by the kind of beauty that can be found in some art. Bell makes a distinction between natural beuaty, such as a beautiful face or a beautiful flower or butterfly wintgs, and the beauty that is a particular property of art. He had arrived at the conclusion that there is one quality in what he considered to be art worthy of the name, amounting in his view to the very definition or essence of art, and that he identified as Significant Form.
Bell's book "Art," which was published in 1913, and a book by philosopher Susanne K. Langer, "Feeling and Form" published in the 50s, together educated my eyes to the aesthetic experience of art. It was an experience I had had, and I believe it's what I always sought in art, but there are so many different ways of experiencing art that this one most important way is easily lost. Those two books cleared away all the irrelevant stuff that is so distracting and allowed me to see what mattered most to me, the experience of the special kind of beauty that art can give
There are many directions to go in this conversation but I want to stick to the bare bones if I can. I don't want to take a position on Bell's claim that significant form IS art and that's what art is, even if I am sympathetic to that view. Art can be whatever you want to it to be, I just want to say that the aesthetic experience is the whole point for me and nothing else enters into it. I may like different kinds of pictures for different reasons, but the ones I am inclined to call art are the ones that bring me that pecular pleasure called aesthetic. I don't know if Bell is ritght that Significant Form is the essencew of art and the only means to the aesthetic experience but I'm willing to entertain the idea. But it woujld take more research than I'm going to do in order to arrive at my own conclusion about that. Nevertheless, as he presents the idea in his book it so focused the experience of art for me that I shed a lifetime of irrelvant baggage and could finally identify in art what I'd always been looking for and hadn't found until then, until his book and Langer's.
Over the last few days I've been updating my knowledge of the art world, watching videos of lectures by today's reigning art critics, as well as interviews with them, did a google search for names of today's most prominent artists and skimmed through pages and pages of thumbnails of their paintings. Here and there I see something that sort of almost provokes an aesthetic emotion, but for the most part it is an amazing wasteland as far as aesthetic experience goes. It is as if they've turned Bell's concept upside down. What we are getting is all the very content he called inessential to art and none of the art itself according to his definition. In his frame of refrence on the other hand a work of art could contain much that is inessential to the aesthetic experience and yet also contain the significant form that provokes that experience. Today's art hits my eye as absolutely devoid of any shred of aesthetic interest whatever. And yet Bell is supposed to have been a major influence toward modern art.
If there is a true aesthetic experience to be had in this modern wasteland someone who has experienced it would have to walk me through it so i could see it for myself. All I can say is that I don't. I find i repugnant. Almost all of it with few exceptions Whatever people enjoy about this kind of art, it isn't beauty.
It may well be that if I understood better what Bell means by Significant Form that much of it wouldn't move me at all. I grant his superior sensitivity to such experiences and assume I'm the deficient one, but all I can do is like what I like. And it is an experience of the ecstatic sort that I've stumbled onto from time to time that makes me think he has the key to it since he speaks of his own ecstasies over art. He attributes them to Significant Form. He may be right.
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