Art

Clive Bell’s sharp-witted friend can build an airtight argument that a handsaw is a work of art—and apparently sees no reason to stop there. What, Bell asks, makes a painting or a bowl art, while a useful object remains just an object?

In this early twentieth-century essay, Bell takes on aesthetics with a mixture of provocation and careful argument. A critic, he says, cannot simply announce that a picture is art; he must make us see what moves us. From Byzantine churches and Chartres windows to carpets, sculpture and paintings, Bell searches for the quality these varied works share: “significant form,” the arrangement of lines and colours that stirs aesthetic emotion. But if our judgments begin in personal feeling, can any theory of art speak to us all?

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