art as significant form

8/13/2019 Art as Significant Form

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Clive Bell

Sept. 16, 1881Sept. 18, 1994

East Shefford, Berkshire

Children of William Heward Bell and Hannah Taylor Cory

Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge He met and married Vanessa Stephen

Flirted with Virginia Woolf (Vanessas sister)

He was a wealthy snob, hedonist, and womanizer, a racist

and an anti-Semite, who changed from a liberal socialist andpacifist into a reactionary appeaser.


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Art as Significant Form

Although Bells influential book, Art aims to legitimate a variety of forms

of Postimpressionist painting, it will be useful for us to consider the effect of

Cubism on Bells thinking. Cubist painting eschews the goal of accurate

representation, its appearing in distorted or simplified form. Many

intellectuals of the time regarded Cubism as the future of Painting. But

Cubism also represents a problem for the philosophy of art. If the Cubist

painter doest not aim to reproduce reality faithfully, then what is the essence

of art? Bells answer is that significant form is the quality distinguishing

artworks from other things. A piece of abstract art is art, provokes anaestheticemotion.


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Cubism


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Art as Significant Form

According to this theory, all objects that evoke aesthetic emotion in us

share one quality - significant form - which can be defined as significant

relationships between lines, shapes, colors, and other sensory properties.

Like Kant, proponents of this theory see the aesthetic judgement based on a

universal standard and the origin of the aesthetic emotion within the object

itself.


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Nigel Warburton writes in "Philosophy: The Basics" (P122)

about two criticisms of the significant form theory.

"The argument for the significant form theory appears to be circular.

It seems only to be saying that the aesthetic emotion is produced by an

aesthetic-emotion-producing property about which nothing more can be

said. This is like explaining how a sleeping tablet works by referring to

its sleep-inducing property. It is a circular argument because that which

is supposed to be explained is used in the explanation. However, some

circular arguments can be informative; those which cannot are known

as viciouslycircular. Defenders of the theory would argue that it is not

viciously circular as it sheds light on why some people are better criticsthan others, namely because they have a better ability to detect

significant form. It also justifies treating works of art from different

cultures and ages as similar in many ways to present-day works of art."


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"this is to assume what the theory is supposed to be proving:

that there is indeed one aesthetic emotion and that it is

produced by genuine works of art. The theory, then, appears

irrefutable. And many philosophers believe that if a theory islogically impossible to refutebecause every possible observation

would confirm it, then it is a meaningless theory."


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"The Necessity of Art, A Marxist

Approach" Ernst Fischer (1959)

"In order to be an artist it is necessary to seize, hold and transform

experience into memory, memory into expression, material into form

"Art is the giving of form, and form alone makes a product into a work of

art. Form is not something accidental, arbitrary or inessential (no more than

the form of a crystal is any of those things). The Laws and conventions of

form are the embodiment of man's mastery over matter; in them,

transmitted experience is preserved and all achievement is kept safe; they

are the order necessary to art and life."

art as significant form

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