Ok, it’s been a bit longer than a week, but my excuse is an attack of man flu!

Picking up where the last entry finished, I read Art by Clive Bell. Even though he did come across as being pompous and arrogant, the point he was making felt only half cooked and too limited. The main thrust of his argument was that a work of art has something called a significant form. By this he doesn’t mean the the form such as line and shape, but an emotional form that is transmitted to the viewer. The reason for this is because when the book was written in 1911 the definition of art was diversifying strongly and he wanted a theory to cover all aspects and by using the theory of significant form he was able to explain why abstract art and impressionism could still be called art.

The drawback to this is that it is too limiting and is sacrificing photography to being a work of art, that the veracity of the image would mean it could never be considered art when it is obvious that photography can and does have a huge emotional effect. But the concept of significant form does seem appealing for containing an emotional influence.

Since I was looking at emotion being transmitted in art, specifically photography, I thought it would be wise to actually learn a bit more about emotions, so I read Emotions: A Short Introduction that basically explained why we have emotions, how they sort of work and how they help or hinder us. It transpires that there is a sort of hierarchy to emotions with Joy, Distress, Anger, Fear, Surprise and Disgust being our basic emotions, then there is culturally specific emotions where the author concentrates on an emotion called “being a wild pig” and then there is the cognitive emotions such as romantic love.

The really interesting part of this is the cognitive emotions could also be the aesthetic emotions that we feel when we look at art. So with feelings such as Sublime or Beauty, these can be cognitively produced that leads to a subjective feeling and so explains why qualities such as beauty are not universal but our capacity to experience it is. I’ve got to admit that I do find this really exciting, that I have finally found a theory that explains beauty!

My next step is to start writing and to work out how valid this theory really is. To do this I need to review what I have read over the last few months, and put it together coherently. I hope to have this does by the end of the month as I have tutorial at the beginning of February.