We all agree now - by "we" I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.
"Arthur Clive Heward Bell", generally known as "Clive Bell", was an English art critic, associated with Formalism (art)/formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. Bell died, aged 83, in London.
If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous critics! More Clive Bell on Wikipedia.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.
For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life.
There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.
Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.
The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.
It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.
Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.
Comfort came in with the middle classes.
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