Expression Theories of Art

Expression theories hold that art is essentially the expression or communication of emotion, locating the work's artistic value in its embodiment of feeling.

Definition

An expression theory of art holds that a work is art in virtue of expressing emotion: the artist articulates and clarifies a feeling and embodies it in a medium such that an audience can apprehend it.

Scope

This topic covers expressivist accounts of the nature of art associated with Romanticism and developed philosophically by Tolstoy and Collingwood, including the distinction between expressing and merely arousing or describing emotion, the idea that creation clarifies the artist's feeling, and the contrast between art and craft. It does not treat the separate question of how emotional properties are ascribed to artworks, addressed under the aesthetic and aesthetic experience.

Core questions

• What is it for a work of art to express an emotion?
• Does expressing emotion differ from arousing or describing it?
• Is the expressed emotion the artist's own, or one merely presented?
• Can expression serve as a defining essence of art?

Key theories

Art as transmission of feeling

Tolstoy holds that art is the activity by which one person consciously transmits feelings they have lived through to others, who are infected by the same feelings, with sincerity and universality marking good art.

Expression as clarification (Collingwood)

Collingwood distinguishes art proper from craft and from arousal, arguing that genuine art is the imaginative expression by which an artist comes to know and articulate an initially inchoate emotion.

History

Expression theory grew out of Romantic conceptions of art as the outpouring of feeling, displacing the older mimetic paradigm in the nineteenth century. Tolstoy gave it a moralized communicative form, and Croce and Collingwood developed sophisticated idealist versions in which the artwork is an imaginative expression that clarifies emotion. Mid-twentieth-century critics objected that the theory conflates the artist's psychology with the work's properties, prompting a shift toward analyzing expressive qualities of works themselves.

Debates

Expressing vs. arousing emotion

Whether art expresses an emotion the artist felt or merely arouses emotion in audiences divides communicative theories like Tolstoy's from clarificatory theories like Collingwood's, and both from arousalist accounts.

The romantic-expression fallacy

Critics argue that ascribing the work's emotional character to the artist's actual feelings is a mistake, since a sad melody need not have been composed by a sad person.

Key figures

• Leo Tolstoy
• R. G. Collingwood
• Benedetto Croce
• John Dewey

Seminal works

• tolstoy1897
• collingwood1938

Frequently asked questions

Does expression theory require the artist to actually feel the emotion?

Tolstoy's communicative version does, but later critics argue that a work can be expressive of sadness without its maker being sad, which is why contemporary aesthetics often analyzes expressive properties of the work rather than the artist's psychology.

How does Collingwood distinguish art from craft?

Craft, for Collingwood, applies known means to a preconceived end, whereas art proper is the imaginative expression of an emotion the artist does not fully grasp until the work clarifies it.