We must arrive at the theory of art by means of a detour. ![]() In order to understand the meaning of artistic products, we have to forget them for a time, to turn aside from them and have recourse to the ordinary forces and conditions of experience that we do not usually regard as esthetic. If one is willing to grant this position, even if only by way of temporary experiment, he will see that there follows a conclusion at first sight surprising. The theorist who would deal philosophically with fine art has a like task to accomplish. It is the business of those who are concerned with the theory of the earth, geographers and geologists, to make this fact evident in its various implications. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations. Mountain peaks do not float unsupported they do not even just rest upon the earth. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience. In addition, the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. ![]() Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally and physically. BY one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them.
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