23 quotes
The true antithesis of nature is not art but arbitrary conceit, fantasy, and stereotyped convention.
Art as Experience (1934)
Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not understood to obtain its full effect.
Art as Experience (1934)
Interest only becomes one-sided and morbid only when it ceases to be frank, and becomes sly and furtive.
Art as Experience (1934)
All the cases in which means and ends are external to one another are non-esthetic.
Art as Experience (1934)
In all ranges of experience, externality of means defines the mechanical.
Art as Experience (1934)
Works of art express space as opportunity for movement and action.
Art as Experience (1934)
Art expresses, it does not state; it is concerned with existences in their perceived qualities, not with conceptions symbolized in terms.
Art as Experience (1934)
Artist and perceiver alike begin with what may be called a total seizure, an inclusive qualitative whole not yet articulated, not distinguished into members.
Art as Experience (1934)
The recurrence of relations—not of elements—in different contexts, which constitutes transposition is qualitative and hence directly experienced in perception.
Art as Experience (1934)
Emotion is informed and carried forward when it is spent indirectly in search for material and in giving it order, not when it is directly expended.
Art as Experience (1934)
Because energy is not restrained by other elements that are at once antagonistic and cooperative, action proceeds by jerks and spasms. There is discontinuity.
Art as Experience (1934)
So we are always esthetically disappointed when the sensuous qualities and the intellectual properties of an object do not coalesce.
Art as Experience (1934)
Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value.
Art as Experience (1934)
What happens in the movement of art is emergence of new materials of experience demanding expression, and therefore involving in their expression new forms and techniques.
Art as Experience (1934)
It cannot be inserted too strongly That what is not immediate is not esthetic.
Art as Experience (1934)
Naturalism is a word of many meetings in philosophy as well as in art. like most isms — classicism and romanticism, idealism and realism in art — it’s has become an emotional term, a war cry of partisans.
Art as Experience (1934)
Equally there is no rhythm when variations are not placed. There is a wealth of suggestions in the phrase “takes place”. The change not only comes but it belongs; it had its definite place in a larger whole.
Art as Experience (1934)
No work of art can be instantaneously perceived because there is the no opportunity for conservation and increase in tension, and hence none for that release and unfolding which gives volume to a work of art.
Art as Experience (1934)
Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment.
Art as Experience (1934)
We cannot grasp any idea, any organ of meditation, we cannot possess it in full force, until we have felt and sensed it, as much so as if it were an odor or a color.
Art as Experience (1934)