The Gate of Appreciation: Studies in the Relation of Art to LifeNoyes, Carleton Eldredge
Philosophy
The Gate of Appreciation: Studies in the Relation of Art to Life
Noyes, Carleton Eldredge
Aesthetics; Art appreciation; Art criticism
The assertion that art is thus involved with need seems for the
moment to run counter to the usual conception, which regards art as
a product of leisure, a luxury, and the result not of labor but of play.
Art in its higher forms becomes more and more purely the
expression of emotion, the un-trammeled record of the artist's
spiritual experience. It is only when physical necessities have been
met or ignored that the spirit of man has free range. But the maker
who adds decoration to his bowl after he has moulded it is just as
truly fulfilling a need--the need of self-expression--as he fulfilled a
need when he fashioned the bowl in the first instance in order that he
might slake his thirst. Art is not superadded to life,--something
different in kind. All through its ascent from its rudimentary forms
to its highest, from hut to cathedral, art is coordinate with the
development of life, continuous and without breach or sudden end; it
is the expression step by step of ever fuller and ever deeper
experience.
Creation, therefore, follows upon the consciousness of need,
whether the need be physical, as with the traveler, or spiritual, as
with the painter; from physical to spiritual we pass by a series of
gradations. At their extremes they are easy to distinguish, one from
the other; but along the way there is no break in the continuity. The
current formula for art, that art is the utterance of man's joy in his
work, is not quite accurate. In the act of creation the maker finds the
expression of himself. The man who decorates a bowl in response to
his own creative impulse is expressing himself. The painter who
thrills to the wonder and significance of nature is impelled to
expression; and his delight is not fully realized and complete until he
has uttered it. Such art is love expressed, and the artist's work is his
"hymn of the praise of things." But the joy for both the potter and
the painter, the joy which is so bound up with art as to partake of its
very essence, is the joy which attends self-expression and the
satisfaction of the need.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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