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There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

Clive Bell

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Clive Bell
Age: 83 †
Born: 1881
Born: September 16
Died: 1964
Died: September 18
Art Critic
Art Historian
Painter
Great Shefford
Berkshire
Arthur Clive Heward Bell
Quality
Art
Possessing
Cannot
Altogether
Without
Worthless
Must
Degree
Work
Degrees
Exist
Least

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I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.
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It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.
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Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true that what we like is not necessarily good and that all questions are open.
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It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.
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We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.
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Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.
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We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.
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Comfort came in with the middle classes.
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Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.
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Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.
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Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of this trade: ask nothing of him. Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no-one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute.
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Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo.... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes.
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The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.
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