Art And Relligion Are Not Professions: They

The Starting-point For All Systems Of Aesthetics Must Be The Personal Experience Of A Peculiar Emotion. The Objects That Provoke This Emotion We Call Works Of Art.

What Quality Is Shared By All Objects That Provoke Our Aesthetic Emotions? Only One Answer Seems Possible— Significant Form. In Each, Lines And Colors Combined In A Particular Way; Certain Forms And Relations Of Forms, Stir Our Aesthetic Emotions. These Relations And Combinations Of Lines And Colors, These Aesthetically Moving Forms, I Call ‘significant Form’; And ‘significant Form’ Is The One Quality Common To All Works Of Visual Art.

A Rose Is The Visible Result Of An Infinitude Of Complicated Goings On In The Bosom Of The Earth And In The Air Above, And Similarly A Work Of Art Is The Product Of Strange Activities In The Human Mind.

It Would Follow That 'significant Form' Was Form Behind Which We Catch A Sense Of Ultimate Reality.

The Representative Element In A Work Of Art May Or May Not Be Harmful, But It Is Always Irrelevant. For To Appreciate A Work Of Art, We Must Bring With Us Nothing From Life, No Knowledge Of Its Affairs And Ideas, No Familiarity With Its Emotions.