Art | Page 4

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, &c., &c., 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.
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 Sta. 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 Cézanne? 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.
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.
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