Position
Aesthetic Formalism
Something is a work of art in virtue of its form — the arrangement of lines, colours, and relations that provokes aesthetic emotion — and not in virtue of what it represents.
Classification
- Position level
- specific
- Domains
- Aesthetics
Overview
Bell sought the single quality shared by works as unlike each other as a Persian bowl, a Chinese carpet, a Giotto fresco, and a Cézanne, and answered that it is significant form: the combination of elements that stirs aesthetic emotion in a viewer attending to the work itself.
The account is deliberately indifferent to subject matter, moral content, and the artist's biography, which is both its appeal and its cost. It gives a criterion that can be applied by looking, and it must then treat what a painting is of as beside the point.
Position on
Incompatible positions
- Expression Theory of Art
Question scope: The Definition of Art
- Institutional Theory of Art
Question scope: The Definition of Art
References
- Clive Bell, Art (1914), Part I ch. 1
- Clive Bell, Art (1914), Part I ch. 1 'The Aesthetic Hypothesis', which names significant form as the one quality common to all works of visual art
- Clive Bell, Art (1914), Part I ch. 1, which holds that what makes a work art is significant form and expressly not the emotion or the life it conveys
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Definition of Art, §§1-2 (the institutional definition denies that any exhibited property, form included, confers art status)