DAILY EXERCISES: RC#1

That there is an irrelevant representative or descriptive element in many great works of art is not in the least

surprising. Representation is not of necessity baneful, and highly realistic forms may be extremely significant.

Very often, however, representation is a sign of weakness in an artist. A painter too feeble to create forms

that provoke more than a little aesthetic emotion will try to eke that little out by suggesting the emotions of

life. To evoke the emotions of life he must use representation. Thus a man will paint an execution, and,

fearing to miss with his first barrel of significant form, will try to hit with his second by raising an emotion of

fear or pity. But if in the artist an inclination to play upon the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering

inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective

sensibility always. It means that his aesthetic emotions are weak or, at any rate, imperfect.

Before a work of art people who feel little or no emotion for pure form find themselves at a loss. They are

deaf men at a concert. They know that they are in the presence of something great, but they lack the power

of apprehending it. They know that they ought to feel for it a tremendous emotion, but it happens that the

particular kind of emotion it can raise is one that they can feel hardly or not at all. And so they read into the

forms of the work those facts and ideas for which they are capable of feeling emotion, and feel for them the

emotions that they can feel—the ordinary emotions of life. When confronted by a picture, instinctively they

refer back its forms to the world from which they came.

They treat created form as though it were imitated form, a picture as though it were a photograph. Instead

of going out on the stream of art into a new world of aesthetic experience, they turn a sharp corner and

come straight home to the world of human interests. For them the significance of a work of art depends on

what they bring to it; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old material is stirred. A good work of

visual art carries a person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy: to use art as a means

to the emotions of life is to use a telescope for reading the news. You will notice that people who cannot

feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their subjects; whereas people who can, as often as

not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the representative element, and

so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities of

colours. Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or not a man is a good artist. They are

concerned only with lines and colours, their relations and quantities and qualities; but from these they win

an emotion more profound and far more sublime than any that can be given by the

description of facts and ideas.

31. According to the passage, an artist whose painting of an event looks like a photograph is likely to be

(a) a great artist.

(b) a flawed artist.

(d) someone who cannot be called an artist.

32. "Deaf men at a concert" suggests that the author

(a) believes that some people cannot appreciate art because they try too hard.

(b) believes that some people do not understand art and aesthetics.

(d) believes that the common man cannot understand or appreciate art.

33. According to the passage, a person who cannot remember the subject of a picture is likely to be

(a) capable of really appreciating art and feeling pure aesthetic emotions.

(b) not capable of really appreciating art and feeling pure aesthetic emotions.

(d) a person who uses a telescope to read the news.

DAILY EXERCISES