Artistic Representation and form

Clive Bell

a. Essentialism and significant form

According to Clive Bell, he said that the starting point of aesthetics systems should
be personal experince of peculiar emotion. Beside that, Bell start his assumption, he belives is
derived from common sense, aesthetic experince is essentially private. In other words, “the
object that provoke this emotion we call works of art”. Bell’s aesthetic theory was focused on
aesthetic experince. his assumption that there is a certain uniquely aesthetic emotion that
aesthetic qualities are the qualities in an object that evoke this emotion. The visual arts the
emotion is certain “forms and relations of forms” such as line and colour, which Bell called
“significant form”. Aesthetic response to significant form is not to be identified, according to
Bell, with other emotional responses, While these are all perfectly appropriate responses, they
are not aesthetic responses. Rather the aesthetic response is a response to the forms and
relations of forms themselves, regardless of what other meanings, associations or uses they
may have. It is a strong emotion, often a kind of ecstasy, akin to the ecstasy felt in religious
contemplation. The emotion, and the kinds of significant form that evoke it. According to
Bell, there must be one quality which is the essence of Art and without which an object
cannot truly be called a work of art. That essential quality he refers to as 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. This is the account that
Bell gives.

b. The subjectivity of Aesthetic Experince

Bell claims that aesthetic emotion is produced by significant form. Significant
form is the quality that makes a thing a work of art. Thus, it follows that all works of
art produce aesthetic emotion. It also follows from what Bell has said that there are no
objective criteria by means of which one could distinguish works of art from other
kinds of objects, the appreciation of art is a matter of taste. Rembering that the
appreciation of art is a matter of taste and depends upon a sensitive (and properly
trained) observer, the function of the critic must be to help us apprehend significant
form and, thus, experience aesthetic emotion. Thus, aesthetic experience is not
cognitive, i.e. it is not a judgment involving concept. But while aesthetic judgments
about whether or not something of art is entirely subjective and based on feelings and
 feelings, does not mean that important forms of theory have no general validity, We
may disagree about whether an object has a significant form based on our different
feelings when viewing objects, but we can still agree that something must have a
significant form in order to become a work of art. This is an important distinction:
Ask if this painting has a significant or not very different form by asking if this
painting requires a meaningful form in order to become a work of art.

c. Beauty and Aesthetic Experince

In a passage not included in your text, Bell claims that beauty is a more
general concept than significant form. Natural objects can be beautiful, but they are
not works of art. One must also be careful to distinguish between an appreciation of
beauty (or form) and the desire that one might have to possess the form or the thing
that embodies the form. To appreciate a thing aesthetically is to take pleasure in the
mere appearance of the thing, with no thought or interest in owning it, preserving it,
that is with no attachment to it.
d. Because art is defined by Bell as the embodiment of significant form, irrespective of
content, representational features or information conveyed by the work of art to the
viewer, it follows that art is independent of life and our social relations. To the extent
that we treat an object as art, we must necessarily bracket all concerns relative to
everyday worldly life.