ΤΕΧΝΗ ΚΑΙ ΑΙΣΘΗΤΙΚΗ

(συνεχεια των 2 προηγουμενων αναρτησεων)

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Art and aesthetics

8. However we define the sense of beauty, we must immediately qualify it as theoretical; the abstract sense of beauty is merely the elementary basis of the artistic activity. The exponents of this activity are living men and their activity is subject to all the cross-currents of life. There are three stages: first, the mere perception of material qualities - colours, sounds, gestures, and many more complex and undefined physical reactions; second, the arrangement of such perceptions into pleasing shapes and patterns. The aesthetic sense may be said to end with these two processes, but there may be a third stage which comes when such an arrangement of perceptions is made to correspond with a previously existing state of emotion or feeling. Then we say that the emotion or feeling is given expression. In this sense it is true to say that art is expression - nothing more and nothing less. But it is always necessary to remember (which the Croceans sometimes fail to do) that expression in this sense is a final process depending on the preceding processes of sensuous perception and formal (pleasurable) arrangement. Expression can be completely devoid of formal arrangement, but then its very incoherence forbids us to call it art.

Aesthetics, or the science of perception, is only concerned with the first two processes; art may involve beyond these values of an emotional kind. It may be said that nearly all the confusion in the discussion of art arises from the failure to keep this distinction clear; ideas that concern only the history of art are introdused into discussions of the concept of beauty; the purpose of art, which is the communication of feeling, is inextricably confused with the quality of beauty, which is the feeling communicated by particular forms.