R. G. Collingwood's Theory Of Art Is Expression

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Art uses beauty, emotion, and drama to influence the audience into expressing their feelings. R.G. Collingwood argues that art is not an object that you can fabricate, it is the expression of emotion in your mind. Giving an expression individualizes it, which rather than describing the emotion in words, the expression is a feature of the statement itself. This means that art shouldn’t have any limits because expression wouldn’t be able to differentiate itself from others. Art is expression, it is important because we need to able to recognize what our feelings are therapeutic. Expression is needed to make art because it gives it a unique sense to it and gives people different emotions based on that expression. Collingwood is right to think that art is expression. Expression theory is a therapeutic value of art. “To become fully conscious of it means becoming conscious of it not merely as an instance of anger, but as this quite peculiar anger. Expressing it, we saw, has something to do with becoming conscious of it; …show more content…

His theory is that art is made from an expression of the artist and the art allows the audience to feel their own emotions. “So an ‘artist’ setting out to produce a certain emotion in his audience is setting out to produce not an individual emotion, but an emotion of a certain kind,” (113). This is an example of arousing an emotion. So this defends the argument by showing that everyone is feeling something from the artwork, no matter the feeling, they are feeling something from the artwork. Even though, in the counter-argument it showed someone feeling anger towards that song, it makes it therapeutic because that person was able to express an emotion from that song. If they were never to listen to the song, they wouldn’t have been able to express that emotion of anger that they’ve never experienced before. Art allows you to express

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