Appreciating an Artwork

“In order 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.” — Clive Bell

In order to understand the above lines, we must understand what Bell means by the word ‘appreciate’.

He does not mean that, In order to ‘understand’ a work of art…, he describes appreciation as an ‘emotion’ one feels when they look at a work of art. He says that it is not an ordinary or everyday thing to appreciate a work of art and the emotion we feel is not familiar to us from life.

According to him, appreciation of painting does not require us to bring any already existing knowledge or ideas about its context. There is no need of relating it to ‘the world from which they came’. It requires knowledge to understand representation of three-dimensional space but no more. We try to go into the technicalities of the artwork and try to relate it to the world of ‘human interests’, just in order to acquire something from it.

He also dismisses both representation of recognisable objects, or content and context from his account of the appreciation of paintings. It is not bad in itself but it detracts the viewer from appreciating the form.