Art :: essays research papers

I. Reading Clive Bell Sometimes I wonder virtually Clive Bell. After all, the man was obviously no fool. On the contrary-his every credential, every little detail of his career tells us otherwisehis life as the superior young student educated at Trinity College, hob-nobbing with other future intellectual heavyweights such as Lytton Strachey, Sydney-Turner,Leonard Woolf the young scholar (described by friends as beingness a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire) who, along with Thoby,Adrian, Virginia (later Woolf) and Vanessa (later Bell) Stephens, was to become part of the very core of former(a) Bloomsbury the eminent art critic who provedcrucial in gaining popular acceptance for the art of the Post-Impressionists in Great Britain-all of this serves as an almost overwhelming organic structure of evidence pointing tothe fact that this man was an intellectual of the very finest water. For myself, however, the above also serves to add a measure of urgency t o this question why do Ifind myself in almost constant disagreement with practically everything that Clive Bell has to say about art? I am inclined to say that it has something to do with the fact that, for him, it is not art-it is Art, art-with-a-capital-a, so to speak. What I mean by this will bemade plain through a countersign of his main book on the topic, (the very imaginatively titled) Art. Bell starts by postulating that there is but one kind of emotionalresponse to all plant of art, or at any rate to all works of visual art. This is what he calls the aesthetic emotion it is intrinsic to both the appreciation and creationof art, and it is a response triggered by what (according to him) all works of visual art fox in common significant form (which is a concept that Ill have more tosay about later). True, he says, different people respond differently to the same works, but what matters, according to him, is that all of these different responses arenot different in kind. For according to him all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of works of art we babble. This extraordinary statement is to be found on page 6 of the edition of the book that I have before me-and here, already, I find myself in disagreement with Mr. Bell.In his statement of the case, is there any logical reason to believe that we do not gibber?