By Herbert Read

The simple word “art” is most usually associated with those arts which we distinguish as "plastic" or “visual", but properly speaking it should include the arts of literature and music．There are certain characteristics common to all the arts，and though in these notes we are concerned only with the plastic arts，a definition of what is common to all the arts is the best starting-point of our enquiry．

It was Schopenhauer who first said that a11 arts aspire to the condition of music；that remark has often been repeated，and has been the cause of a good deal of misunderstanding，but it does express an important truth．Schopenhauer was thinking of  the abstract qualities of music；in music，and almost in music alone，it is possible for the artist to appeal to his audience directly，without the intervention of a medium of communication in common use for other purposes．The architect must express himself in buildings which have some utilitarian purpose．The poet must use words, which are bandied about in the daily give—and—take of conversation．The painter usually expresses himself by the representation of the visible world．Only the composer of music is perfectly free to create a work of art of his own consciousness，( the ideas and opinions of a person or group) and with on other aim than to please. But all artists have this same intention，the desire to please；and art is most simply and most usually defined as an attempt to create pleasing forms．Such forms satisfy our sense of beauty and the sense of beauty is satisfied when we are able to appreciate a unity or harmony of formal relations among our sense-perceptions．

Any general theory of art must begin with this supposition：that man responds to the shape and surface and mass of things present to his senses，and that certain arrangements in the proportion of the shape and surface and mass of things result in a pleasurable sensation，whilst the lack of such arrangement leads to indifference or even to positive discomfort and revulsion．The sense of pleasurable relations is the sense of beauty；the opposite sense is the sense of ugliness．It is possible，of course，that some people are quite unaware of portions in the physical aspect of things．Just as some people are color-blind，so others may be blind to shape and surface and mass．But just as people who are color-blind are comparatively rare, so there is every reason to believe that people wholly unaware of the other visible properties of objects are equally rare. They are more likely to be undeveloped.

There are at least a dozen current definitions of beauty, but the merely physical one I have already given ( beauty is a unity of formal relations perceptions) is the only essential one, and from this basis we can build up a the theory of art which is as inclusive any theory of art need be. But it is perhaps important to emphasize at the outset  the extreme relativity of this term beauty. The only alternative is to say that art has no necessary connection with beauty --- a perfectly logical position to hold if we confine the term to that concept of beauty established by the Greeks and continued by the classical tradition in Europe. My own preference is to regard the sense of beauty as a very fluctuating phenomenon, with manifestations in the course of history that are very uncertain and often very baffling. Art should include all such manifestations, and the test of a serious student of art is that, whatever his own sense of beauty, he is willing to admit into the realm of art the genuine manifestations of that sense in other people at other periods. For him, Primitive, Classical and Gothic are of equal interest, and he is not so much concerned to assess the relative merits of such periodical manifestations of the sense of beauty as to distinguish between the genuine and false of all periods.

Most of our misconceptions of art arise from a lack of consistency in the use of the words art and beauty. It might be said that we are only consistent in our misuse of them．We always assume that all that is beautiful is art, or that all art is beautiful, that what is not beautiful is not art, and that ugliness is the negation of art. This identification of art and beauty is at the bottom of all our difficulties in the appreciation of art，and even in people who are acutely sensitive to aesthetic impressions in general，this assumption acts like an unconscious censor in particular cases when art is not beauty．For art is not necessarily beauty：that cannot be said too often or too blatantly. Whether we look at the problem historically (considering what art has been in past ages ) or sociologically (considering what art actually is in its present-day manifestations all over the world ) we find that art often has been or often is a thing of no beauty．

(Ref. No.: 201001114)