The meaning of art
The simple word `art' is most usually associated with those arts which we distinguish as ‘plastic' or `visual', but properly speaking it should include the arts of literature and music.It was Schopenhauer who first said that all arts aspire to the condition of music; that remark has often been repeated, and has been the cause of a good deal of misunderstanding, but it does express an important truth.
The architect must express himself in buildings which have some utilitarian purpose. The poet must use words which are bandied about in the daily give-andtake of conversation. The painter usually expresses himself by the representation of the visible world. Only the composer of music is perfectly free to create a work of art out of his own consciousness, and with no other aim than to please. But all artists have this same intention, the desire to please; and art is most simply and most usually defined as an attempt to create pleasing forms.Any general theory of art must begin with this supposition: that man responds to the shape and surface and mass of things present to his senses, and that certain arrangements in the proportion of the shape and surface. There are different definitions of beauty, but beauty is a unity of formal relations among our sense-perceptions. We always assume that all that is beautiful is art, or that all art is beautiful, that what is not beautiful is not art, and that ugliness is the negation of art. The concept of beauty is, indeed, of limited historical significance. It arose in ancient Greece and was the offspring of a particular philosophy of life. Art, as well as religion, was an idealization of nature, and especially of man as the culminating point of the process of nature. Art, we must admit, is not the expression in plastic form of any one particular ideal. It is the expression of any ideal that the artist can realize in plastic form.The permanent element in mankind that corresponds to the element of form in art is man's aesthetic sensibility. Sensibility as such we may assume static. What is variable is the interpretation which man gives to the forms of art, which are said to be `expressive' when they correspond to his immediate feelings. Since the early days of Greek philosophy men have tried to find in art a geometrical law, for if art (which they identify with beauty) is harmony, and harmony is the due observance of proportions, it seems reasonable to assume that these proportions are fixed. A German writer, tried to prove that the Golden Section is the key to all morphology, both in nature and in art; and Gustav , the founder of experimental aesthetics, whose principal works were published in the 'seventies, made it one of the foremost objects of his research. Since then, practically every work on aesthetics includes some consideration of the problem. Not only the Golden Section, but other geometrical ratios, such as the square of' the width of a rectangle within the rectangle are employed in almost endless combination to secure a perfect harmony. It is the relative endlessness of such combinations which precludes any mechanistic explanation of the total harmony of 'a work of art. Distortion may mean a departure from regular geometrical harmony, or, more generally, it implies a disregard for the proportions given in the natural world.
The simple word `art' is most usually associated with those arts which we distinguish as ‘plastic' or `visual', but properly speaking it should include the arts of literature and music.It was Schopenhauer who first said that all arts aspire to the condition of music; that remark has often been repeated, and has been the cause of a good deal of misunderstanding, but it does express an important truth.
The architect must express himself in buildings which have some utilitarian purpose. The poet must use words which are bandied about in the daily give-andtake of conversation. The painter usually expresses himself by the representation of the visible world. Only the composer of music is perfectly free to create a work of art out of his own consciousness, and with no other aim than to please. But all artists have this same intention, the desire to please; and art is most simply and most usually defined as an attempt to create pleasing forms.Any general theory of art must begin with this supposition: that man responds to the shape and surface and mass of things present to his senses, and that certain arrangements in the proportion of the shape and surface. There are different definitions of beauty, but beauty is a unity of formal relations among our sense-perceptions. We always assume that all that is beautiful is art, or that all art is beautiful, that what is not beautiful is not art, and that ugliness is the negation of art. The concept of beauty is, indeed, of limited historical significance. It arose in ancient Greece and was the offspring of a particular philosophy of life. Art, as well as religion, was an idealization of nature, and especially of man as the culminating point of the process of nature. Art, we must admit, is not the expression in plastic form of any one particular ideal. It is the expression of any ideal that the artist can realize in plastic form.The permanent element in mankind that corresponds to the element of form in art is man's aesthetic sensibility. Sensibility as such we may assume static. What is variable is the interpretation which man gives to the forms of art, which are said to be `expressive' when they correspond to his immediate feelings. Since the early days of Greek philosophy men have tried to find in art a geometrical law, for if art (which they identify with beauty) is harmony, and harmony is the due observance of proportions, it seems reasonable to assume that these proportions are fixed. A German writer, tried to prove that the Golden Section is the key to all morphology, both in nature and in art; and Gustav , the founder of experimental aesthetics, whose principal works were published in the 'seventies, made it one of the foremost objects of his research. Since then, practically every work on aesthetics includes some consideration of the problem. Not only the Golden Section, but other geometrical ratios, such as the square of' the width of a rectangle within the rectangle are employed in almost endless combination to secure a perfect harmony. It is the relative endlessness of such combinations which precludes any mechanistic explanation of the total harmony of 'a work of art. Distortion may mean a departure from regular geometrical harmony, or, more generally, it implies a disregard for the proportions given in the natural world.
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