How is Art Possible? (1)

Abstract

To ask the somewhat Kantian question of our title is undoubtedly to invite the expectation that a definition of art or a specification of the necessary and sufficient conditions of it, or a summative analysis of it is being proposed. But this is not our intention. Some of what may be necessary conditions have been explored here, but by no means all. We are now concerned only with what may be called the objective conditions, with that which is inherent in the objects of experience, of sense and perception, and which makes it possible to develop aesthetic objects in some sense-modalities but not readily, if at all, in others. To specify other conditions one has to proceed to a much more specific delineation of the media of the particular arts, visual, musical, literary, and other, and beyond this to direct one’s thoughts to the artist himself and to the vast assortment of available techniques. Beyond what is about to be specified, all the form-giving resources already explored at length stand open to the artist.