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September 11, 2007
the significance of a work of art
Goethe says: ‘The highest principle of the ancients was the significant, but the highest result of successful treatment, the beautiful.’
If we look closer at what this opinion implies, we find in it again two elements: the content or the matter in hand, and the mode and fashion of representation. In looking at a work of art we begin with what presents itself immediately to us, and after that go on to consider what is its significance or content.
The former, the external element, has no value for us simply as it stands; we assume something further behind it, something inward, a significance, by which the external semblance has a soul breathed into it. It is this, its soul, that the external appearance indicates. For an appearance which means something does not present to the mind’s eye itself and that which is qua external, but something else; as does the symbol for instance, and still more obviously the fable, whose moral and percept constitutes its meaning. Indeed every word points to a meaning and has no value in itself. Just so the human eye, a man’s face, flesh, skin, his whole figure, are a revelation of mind and soul, and in this case the meaning is always something other than what shows itself within the immediate appearance. This is the way in which a work of art should have its meaning, and not appear as exhausted in these more particular lines, curves, surfaces, borings, reliefs in the stone, in these colors, tones, sounds, of words, or whatever other medium is employed; but it should reveal life, feeling, soul, import and mind, which is just what we mean by the significance of a work of art.
Hegel - Lectures on Aesthetics
Posted by amin at September 11, 2007 10:33 PM