I have often written in the past log that art is not what common notion says.
Such sixteen negative comments were picked and coloured in purple and were rearranged to make a new formalistic theory.
I defined art object as what we enjoy seeing: enjoyable image, therefore
The original art work is not necessary.
Being three dimensional is not important.
Seeing shape formally is seeing on sense, not on perception.
Most adults do not see a shape on sense.
Shape has no background.
Shape has no orientation.
Seeing shape is not binocular but monocular.
Seeing shape is not three dimensional but two dimensional.
Shape has no reality.
Shape is not symbolic.
Colour is not as important as shape.
This theory is not based on cognitive psychology
but is located between cognitive psychology and neurophysiology.
Being scientific,
The degree of sensation is not important.
Being formal in ordinal sense,
How it is made is not important.
Who made it is not important.
It has no history.
Now let me compare the new formalistic theory with Bell's theory.
I picked some sentences from Bell's formalism inWikipedia.
Then I coloured them in blue and gave each one my comment as new formalist.
It is an object's formal properties which make something art.
it is the geometrical characteristics of an object's image which make anything visually interesting.
Knowledge of the historical context of a painting or the intention of the painter is unnecessary for the appreciation of visual art.
There is no difference between art work and the other thing when the knowledge or the intention is irrelevant.
Anything can be art as long as the shape is interesting.
For Kant it meant roughly the shape of an object-colour was not an element in the form of an object.
For Bell, by contrast, "the distinction between form and colour is an unreal one; you cannot conceive of a colourless space; neither can you conceive a formless relation of colours."
The visual sense has two functions: one tactile for shape; the other optical for colour.
The visual grammar is about tactile function:
the eye moves along the contour like the hand moving it along.
Imagine that there are two triangles; the shapes are same but one in yellow and the other in blue.
we can easily recognise the shapes of these triangles are same.
Shape seeing means the fovea of the eye moves along the contour while the colour remains on the retina: shape seeing is different from colour seeing.
We can conceive a triangle without colour; the colour is variable and the shape is constant.
He also suggested that the reason we experience aesthetic emotion in response to the significant form of a work of art was that we perceive that form as an experience the artist has.
We experience sensation in response to the quantified geometric characteristics of a shape.
"An expression of an experience of artist" is not relevant.
He also believed that "there is no state of mind more excellent or more intense than the state of aesthetic contemplation"....that works of visual art were among the most valuable things there could be.
Seeing shape with pleasure is one of the most intense instincts which made creatures survive and evolve.
Seeing shape makes men learn shape's a priori structural system, which becomes the standard model of all the other mental activities.
Now let me move to the quotations from Bell's writing"Art".
That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, etc. etc., is not disputed....all these emotions are recognizably the same in kind....
The emotion provoked by seeing art works is the same as seeing any shapes; the difference is the degree of sensation.
...if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics.
In each, lines and coloured combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions....
"Significant form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art.
All visible things have shape and the common quality is geometrical characteristics of shape.
There is no common objective thing which distinguishes art work from the other shapes.
The term "significant" is irrelevant.
Any system of aesthetics which pretends to be based on some objective truth is so palpably ridiculous as not to be worth discussing....Aesthetic judgements are....matters of taste....
This flower is more beautiful: this is aesthetic judgement.
The judgement involves reference to memory: two activities.
Seeing a flower with pleasant feeling is sense-seeing: one activity.
Aesthetics on sense should be established firstly.
Sounds can be objectively notated though the effect of the sound to the individual may vary.
Musical grammar is the objective basis of musical aesthetics.
"Why are we so profoundly moved by forms related in a particular way?"....forms arranged and combined according to certain and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way.
The combination and arrangement of any limited number of shapes are finite.
The quantity of each characteristics of a shape varies.
The judgement which one is better among the same group of a combination belongs to the second stage of aesthetics.
In a black and white drawing the spaces are all white and all are bounded by black lines; in most oil paintings the spaces are multi-coloured and so are the boundaries; you cannot imagine a boundary line without any content. or a content without a boundary lines....therefore, when I speak of significant form, I mean a combination of line and colours( counting white and black as colours)
On sense level, there is no space inside the boundary line: we see only the line.
Space is perceivable on perception level.
The colour blind can see the boundary line therefore tone is the one to make the boundary line, which is the subject of neurophysiology.
It is not what I call an aesthetic emotion that most of us feel, generally, for natural beauty.
The retinal image of natural thing is like the photograph of the thing and naturalistic painting can be painted after the photograph, then the retinal images of those three things are almost the same .
I wonder....whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied....I have been inquiring why certain combinations of forms move us; I should not have traveled by other roads had I enquired, instead, why certain combinations are perceived to be right and necessary, and why our perception of their rightness and necessity is moving.... the rapt philosopher, and he who contemplates a work of art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its own; that significance is unrelated to the significance of life.
In this world the emotion of life finds no place. It is a world with emotions of its own.
I suggest that aesthetics should be divided into two: one grammatical; the other ,something like poetics, a sort of experimental aesthetics.
The grammar in linguistics is different from literature.
Likewise there is a priori visual grammar as a logical system of shape.
The look of everything is a pattern on retina, which may be the reason why the outside world look unified.
We intuitively learn the structural system which is based on the memory of shapes and it becomes the model of the other mental activity.
The world on sense is the world of pre-perception, of no reality.
There are four mental faculties: sense; perception; cognition; imagination.
each one is responsible to develop four different levels of the outside world; form; object ; the real(physical) world; the imaginative (metaphysical) world.
To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and knowledge of three- dimensional space.
To see a cube or rhomboid as a flat pattern is to lower its significance, and a sense of three-dimensional space is essential to the full appreciation of most architectural forms.
Pictures which would be insignificant if we saw them as flat patterns are profoundly moving because, in fact, we see them as related planes.
If the representation of three-dimensional space is to be called " representation", then I agree that there is one kind of representation which is not irrelevant.
Representational image seeing is on perception level, which may have additional effect of pleasure, nonetheless the image also can be seen on sense level.
There are many types of art work without three-dimensional space, which means that it cannot be the common factor.
The formalists missed a solid theory because they did not separate the two levels: sense; perception.
To write the musical notes after hearing sounds, musicians must be on sense level, in consequence they have musical grammar.
