32 Quotes by Clive Bell

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

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.

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage earners for the leisure class.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life.

Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.