Shanika Edouard October 21, 2015

AMT 254

In-Class Essay

A person who is not really fond of art would argue that art is not necessary. As a

person who appreciates art in every form would argue that art is a way for someone to

express his or her self through something they love to do. I feel like my way to cope with

things and express myself is through poetry. When I write poetry I feel like it is not I

ranting it is simply me just expressing either my anger, sadness, happiness, and etc.

through a process of coming to understanding it fully myself. I feel like artist must

process the emotion, think about it, and understand it through the process of making the

work. Self- understanding on the part of the artist is also very important when making art.

What is major is the artist allows the audience to understand why the emotion is present.

Collingwood stated, Expressing an emotion is not the same thing as describing it. I

really like this quote because I can relate with it a lot. He brings up two important things

when talking about art proper, which are: expression and imagination. I try my best to not

put the emotion I am feeling in any of my writing. He has the same ideas as Tolstoy and

Benedetto Crose that shows arts most important property as its expression and emotion.

When I choose to write a poem about how I am feeling that certain day I want to be able

to be fully conscious of this emotion that I am feeling at that very moment. For example,

if one is feeling depressed one day they should be fully aware of that and with that they

can fully express how they are feeling through the art of poetry. Here is a piece of one of

my poems that I wrote a few years ago that would perfectly backs up my argument.
 Outside it looks like I have everything together

while inside it looks like a mind that cannot be fixed.

A mind that is now a lost cause.

Depression is currently a person renting a place within;

he or she wont leave.

They said theyre going to be staying for awhile,

but if he or she stays longer I will go insane

slowly losing everything in me.

I dont know what to do anymore.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in

oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in

words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling. This is the

activity of art. This quote is very powerful because when writing poetry I feel at times

that I am the only one who may be feeling that way, but actually there are a lot of people

who may be feeling the same way I feel. When someone understands my art that shows

me that I am not in it alone and I have people who understands and validates my feelings

and emotions. Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by

means of certain external signs, hands, on to other feelings he has lived through, and that

other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them (What is Art, p.

40). I agree with Tolstoys view and his argument regarding the relationship between art

and emotion. He asserts that art infects the perceiver with its emotion and that there are
three factors that make a work of art infectious which are: the individuality of the feeling

transmitted, the clearness of expression, and the sincerity of the artist.

I believe through art you can have better communication skills and have a better

understanding of what he or she is trying to express. In Philosophy of The Arts: An

Introduction to Aesthetics Grahams argument is that the best art is when it has a huge

contribution to our understanding of it. I agree with Grahams conclusion that he made of

what the value of art is. When viewing, reading, or listening to art that is ability for a

person to gain understanding. This refers back to Collingwood and he believes that art

proper is a way of exploring emotional situations, and also communicating those

emotional situations in a certain way in order for the audience members to understand the

emotion, but the audience does not feel the emotion that the person who created it is

feeling.

In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building,

book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience, the result is nor

favorable to understanding, states Dewey. This quote really stood out to me because I

feel like it always has something to do with the human experience in some shape or form

rather than the identification of the work of art. Deweys definition of an experience is

being a special kind of experience, one that plays out over time, seems to go

somewhere and has a feeling of fulfillment and conclusion when it ends. I find it

interesting how Dewey is trying to avoid the abstracted views of aesthetic experience as

described by Kant just like Gadamer does in his views.

 In conclusion I believe that art is how a person may communicate with others and

through that the person can grasp a better understanding of how the other is feeling. I

really never thought of the value of art until this Aesthetics class, and it is really

interesting to think about deeper. When writing poetry I will be more conscious of why I

am writing what I am and allowing the audience to understand why the emotion is

present. Art is a process; it is an interaction between an organism and its environments,

that is, as we will see, art is experience, states Dewey.