Next time you stand before the aesthetics of a museum painting or a wild Sierra stream or the Milky Way, think first of Clive Bell’s words:
Be they artists or lovers of art, mystics or mathematicians, those who achieve ecstasy are those who have freed themselves from the arrogance of humanity. He who would feel the significance of art must make himself humble before it. Those who find the chief importance of art or of philosophy in its relation to conduct or its practical utility - those who cannot value things as ends in themselves or, at any rate, as direct means to emotion - will never get from anything the best that it can give. Whatever the world of aesthetic contemplation may be, it is not the world of human business and passion; in it the chatter and tumult of material existence is unheard, or heard only as the echo of some more ultimate harmony.
(Quoted from page 55 of Art, by Clive Bell. Capricorn Books, 1958; originally published in 1914.)
For a brief biography of Clive Bell, click here. For images of or relating to Clive Bell, click here.
Be they artists or lovers of art, mystics or mathematicians, those who achieve ecstasy are those who have freed themselves from the arrogance of humanity. He who would feel the significance of art must make himself humble before it. Those who find the chief importance of art or of philosophy in its relation to conduct or its practical utility - those who cannot value things as ends in themselves or, at any rate, as direct means to emotion - will never get from anything the best that it can give. Whatever the world of aesthetic contemplation may be, it is not the world of human business and passion; in it the chatter and tumult of material existence is unheard, or heard only as the echo of some more ultimate harmony.
(Quoted from page 55 of Art, by Clive Bell. Capricorn Books, 1958; originally published in 1914.)
For a brief biography of Clive Bell, click here. For images of or relating to Clive Bell, click here.
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