Philosophy and the Arts: Lecture 15:

Philosophy and the Arts:Lecture 15: Significant Form

Significant Form- Part I:Logic and Language • This lecture is concerned with the work of Clive Bell (1881-1964), especially his book, Art (1914). Bell was a member of something called the Bloomsbury Group, which included Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, and Duncan Grant (and a few more). • One thing the members had in common was a great admiration for the philosophy of G. E. Moore (1873-1958).

This is G. E. Moore-handsome?

Significant Form?? And Moore?? • Moore was the author of a book they all admired, Principia Ethica (1903). Recall that a few days ago we said some words cannot be defined by genus and difference. Simple qualities, color words such as green or yellow, cannot be thus defined. If someone asks, “What do you mean by ‘green’?”—all you can do is point to something green, and hope he gets the idea. • Notice also that if he does not, all you can do is say there must be something wrong with him—color blind!! Moore thought the moral term ‘good’ was like that—not that just anything counts as good, but that ‘good’, like green, is a simple quality that we learn to “see.”

The “Naturalistic Fallacy”!! • Suppose I say “Pleasure is good,” and mean to identify good with pleasure. Moore called this sort of mistake the “naturalistic fallacy.” • I have argued elsewhere that this is not a fallacy at all, because fallacies are ways of going wrong in arguments; if anything, it is simply a mis- identification. Further, it is a mistake no reputable philosopher ever made.

Why should we care? • One reason we should care is that Bell intended to copy Moore’s argument, and I think he botched the job. He should have said just that art is the stuff he saw as art, to preserve the parallel. • Instead, he said something is art if it has that combination of lines and colors that produced in him an aesthetic experience---and he called this combination “significant form.” • But he does seem to preserve the “intuitionist appeal;” he seems to say that those who disagree with him just don’t understand art.

Now to art—is Frith’s “Paddington Station” art?/

Bell thought Frith’s work fun and interesting, but not art. The reason was it had not significant form. Bell thought art objects may or may not represent anything, but this is always irrelevant. So how about David ?? David might make it. How about David??

Why, David, Why?? • As Carroll notes, 19th and 20th century developments in photography posed a threat to the art of painting. • If the point of it all is to produce a realistic pictureof…the girlfriend, a scene I want to remember, or whatever…then I can reach for my trusted camera. Who needs painters? • Bell’s answer is that is not the point of it all. Form is what matters.

David is O. K., Cezanne is better.

Bell’s point is that form is what matters. If David is O.k., it’s because his works had good formal qualities. Cezanne emphasized form. Whether or not a work also has a “subject” does not matter. But is this true? Form is the important thing…

Sickert the “Ripper??” • Bell’s favorite English painter was Walter Sickert, who did the painting on the previous slide. Sickert was, for a time, a disciple of Whistler, and, in France, an admirer of Degas. • At least one American writer, with forensic experience, is convinced that he was also the notorious “Jack the Ripper.”

Bell liked the work of his friend Sickert, too, but consider Icarus…

Subjects don’t matter?? • Again, Carroll notes that in Breughel’s “Fall of Icarus,” you need to know the subject, poor Icarus over in the lower right corner, to get the point that sometimes, great acts go unnoticed in the flow of history. • In this case, Carroll says, the “structural tension” would be missed, if we ignored the subject. • So subject matter is not irrelevant.

So what about Clive Bell?? • Clive Bell wasn’t much of a philosopher, and young philosophers (I was young once) have delighted in pointing out his errors for 90 years. • But the truth is, he was not a philosopher at all. He read History at Cambridge, then became an art critic. • Quote Carroll once more; he said of Bell, “His book, Art, taught generations of viewers how to understand modern art…this book heralded a revolution in taste.” No small accomplishment.

Philosophy and the Arts: Lecture 15: