Art :: essays research papers

I. Reading Clive Bell sometimes I wonder about Clive Bell. After all, the man was obviously no fool. On the contrary-his e very credential, every little detail of his career tells us otherwisehis life as the brilliant young student amend 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 being a screen out 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 p craftwork of the very core of Old Bloomsbury the grand art critic who provedcrucial in gaining popular credence for the art of the Post-Impressionists in Great Britain-all of this serves as an almost overwhelming eubstance of evidence pointing tothe fact that this man was an intellectual of the very finest water. For myself, however, the above as well serves to add a measure of urgency to this qu estion why do Ifind myself in almost constant disagreement with very much everything that Clive Bell has to say about art? I am habituated 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 manifest through a discussion of his main book on the topic, (the very imaginatively titled) Art. Bell starts by postulating that there is but one miscell whatever of sensealresponse to all works of art, or at either 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 have in frequent significant form (which is a concept that Ill have much 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 differen t in kind. For according to him all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of works of art we gibber. 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?