Sometimes I wonder about Clive Bell. After all, the man was obviously no fool. On the contrary-his every credential, every little detail of his career tells us otherwise: his life as the brilliant young student educated 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 sort 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 part of the very core of Old Bloomsbury; the eminent art critic who proved crucial in gaining popular acceptance for the art of the Post-Impressionists in Great Britain-all of this serves as an almost overwhelming body of evidence pointing to the fact that this man was an intellectual of the very finest water. For myself, however, the above also serves to add a measure of urgency to this question: why do I ind myself in almost constant disagreement with practically everything that Clive Bell has to say about art?
I am inclined 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 be made plain through a discussion of his main book on the topic, (the very imaginatively titled) Art. Bell starts by postulating that there is but one kind of emotional response to all works of art, or at any rate to all works of visual art.
This is what he calls the aesthetic emotion; it is intrinsic to both the appreciation and creation of art, and it is a response triggered by what (according to him) all works of visual art have in common: significant form (which is a concept that Ill have more to say 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 are not different 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.
