6/28/2023 0 Comments Perception definition in artWhile Clive Bell did advance the debate about art by moving it away from requiring strict representation, his definition gets us no closer to understanding what does or does not qualify as an art object. Thus significant form is purely subjective. Aesthetic pleasure exists only in the viewer, not in the object. What brings aesthetic pleasure to one person may not affect another. Unfortunately, aesthetics, pleasure in the beauty and appreciation of art, are impossible to measure or reliably define. Significant form is the collection of those elements that rises to the level of your awareness and gives you noticeable pleasure in its beauty. To address these limitations of existing definitions of art, in 1913 English art critic Clive Bell proposed that art is significant form, or the “quality that brings us aesthetic pleasure.” Bell stated, “to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour.”2 In Bell’s view, the term “form” simply means line, shape, mass, as well as color. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 123. Therefore, it would fail as art according to Tolstoy’s definition.ġ Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? And Essays on Art, trans. Since no feeling had been communicated through it, would it still be a work of art? The work did not “hand on to others” anything at all because it was never seen. Further, suppose an artist created a work of art that no one else ever saw. This definition does not succeed because it is impossible to confirm that the feelings of the artist have been successfully conveyed to another person. He proposed that art is the communication of feeling, stating, “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”1 Tolstoy wrote on many subjects, and is the author of the great novel War and Peace (1869). They succeeded at making artwork that did not copy anything, thus demonstrating that the ancient Greek view of art as mimesis-simple copying-does not sufficiently define art.įigure 1.3 Left: The She-Wolf Right: Gothic, Artist: Jackson Pollock, Author: (CC BY-SA 4.0 "Group de Besanez")Ī later attempt at defining art comes from the nineteenth-century Russian author Leo Tolstoy. (Figure 1.3) While painting these works, Pollock and his fellow artists would consciously avoid making marks or passages that resembled recognizable objects. ![]() Jackson Pollock (1912-1956, USA), a leader in the New York School of the 1950’s, intentionally did not copy existing objects in his art. This definition of art as copying reality has a problem, though. We can only surmise their quality based on tales such as that of Zeuxis and Parhassios, the obvious skill in ancient Greek sculpture, and in drawings that survive on ancient Greek pottery. ![]() We must sadly note that, due to the action of time and weather, no paintings from ancient Greek artists exist today. This approach appears in the realism of ancient Greek sculpture and pottery. The ancient Greeks felt that the visual artist’s goal was to copy visual experience. Parhassios declared himself the victor because the curtain was the painting, and while Zeuxis fooled the birds with his work, Parhassios fooled a thinking human being-a much more difficult feat.įigure 1.2 Zeuxis conceding defeat: "I have deceived the birds, but Parhassios has deceived Zeuxis." Artist: Joachim von Sandrart engraving by Johann Jakob von Sandrart Author: (Public Domain “Fae”). When viewing Parhassios’s work, Zeuxis, on his part, asked that the curtain over the painting be drawn back so he could see his rival’s work more clearly. Parhassios was unimpressed with this achievement. ![]() (Figure 1.2) Zeuxis painted a bowl of grapes that was so lifelike that birds came down to peck at the image of fruit. The ancient Greek definition of art as mimesis, or imitation of the real world, appears in the myth of Zeuxis and Parhassios, rival painters from ancient Greece in the late fifth century BCE who competed for the title of greatest artist.
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