Thanks so much for this wonderful instalment in a thought-provoking series...I've forwarded the link to some of my colleagues in painting, along with the comment that I've discovered a philosopher who can actually speak about art as though he has spent some time earning his understandings, and articulating his responses. Well done, and more please.

Good essay. Now I'm going to have to watch several times to understand it all. Thank you.

As you walk past a piece of art so does your fleeting senses of emotion. Devoid of empathy is devoid of understanding that art has meaning.

What's fascinating to me is the application of these principles/patterns to all forms of art, not just the plastic ones, the rhyme vs rhythm of a song, the measured syllables in a verse vs sentences that gives new life to words you knew your whole life, (line vs colour), and then at times their perfect union that raises those who can create, and appreciate it, to a realm where we're brought closest to another entity as we'll ever be in our inherently lonely human existence, in all it's unique nuance, whatever it is, whoever it is, whenever it is. I always thought that mastering the spoken word is one of the most fundamental liberties a person can achieve, to be free of ourselves, who can say how or what language one should use to express their walk in the woods.

So useful video!!!! Forever grateful

Such a comprehensive take, subscribed:))

very good explanation and referances👍🏻

I believe emotion (no matter what that emotion is) is central to art. In fact, that is how I define art: a production by a concious being intended or resulting in an emotional response from the viewer/participant. Art can also have narrative, intellectual, and social elements, etc, but they are secondary.

this is a really great video! inspired me to continue working on my paper :^)

What an interesting video! Thanks a lot:)

Inspiring! ❤

There is verbal and non verbal meaning. When we say that modern art is about feeling I think we are trying to say that it doesn't have a linguistic meaning that can be rationally explained.

Great content! Thanks for sharing.

'What role does emotion play in the perception or creation of an artwork?' Good question. What is an emotion? What is an artwork? These are too big of questions for the comment section, but important to ask. I agree that expressive theory is limited and believe this is, in part, due to our understanding of emotion. The term evokes the idea of basic feelings. This is where I lean on phenomenology, seeing the mode of art as a way of exploring and relating the full of human experience, not just feelings. THIS is emotion. Yet, the theory is still lacking. Maybe art is still lacking. If art relates human experience, then it becomes about that experience. Just because Johnny had a feeling, I don't need to here about it, let alone immortalize it on canvas. Something about this feels very masturbatory. If experience of making art has taught me anything, it is that the world is much, much larger than us. If art can help me to light up a little more of it, I have done my job. Just as you raised the question in this video. More was conveyed here than an emotion. Thank you for raising the question.

Interesting. I wouldn’t say it’s an efficiency issue so much an expression issue. Something evocative is not just expressing emotion however. It can express relationships, importance, meanings, and “feelings”. Even abstraction includes a lot of presumptions for framing meanings. It’s quite open ended. One of the challenges here is that we are trying to put into words the expression that isn’t in words.

I suggest you study Expressive Arts Therapy to see the connections between Art and Psychology. You may also want to study Environmental Art Therapy and Feminist Art Therapy. Art can be defined as an expression. The Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists used psychology and human emotions to explain art. Free Association is a form of therapy used in psychology, and it is very much related to Free Writing and Automatic Drawing. In art, you can express your feelings, because it is not healthy to repressive your feelings. The more you learn to express your true inner feelings, the more likely it may be for you to overcome depression, anxiety, and mental illness. Hence, art can be used to heal the traumas we experience in life. Expressive Art is a form of therapy. You can also use art to study your dreams, given the role of dream analysis and dream interpretation. Dreams can play an important role in psychology. because dreams are made by your unconscious mind when you sleep. If you want to understand your unconscious mind, then you should study your dreams. You can study dreams by studying dreams as a form of art or literature. You may also want to study Hypnotic art to learn the connections between art and hypnotherapy, Stage hypnotherapy, and street hypnotherapy.

Re. the conventional interpretation of O’Keefe’s “vaginal” flowers pushed by Stieglitz, among others-it’s surprising that contemporary gender theory hasn’t made more hay with the artist’s bisexuality. It enabled her to feel more easily the functional consonances between flower as procreative organ, as ecstatic catalyst and vagina as exactly the same things-and as the ultimate lever of power.

Let me speculate something about Plato, as a philosophy major who married a philosophy major. Plato had a few options when it came to dealing with the passions in his ideal society. He could: A) Ask for a balance between reason and the appetites. This would commit him to articulating what that balance should be and how it should be implemented in a perfect society. Also, this position might require negotiations between the logical and the appetitive, which are notoriously difficult ("I want cake" "You shouldn't eat cake." "So?"). B) Reason is a slave to the passions. This would undermine his ability to argue for a perfect society with rational philosopher kings at the top. Also, it might undermine his use of logical arguments. ("Plato, you only think philosophers are in charge because you're appetites want to be king"). C) We don't listen to the passions. This is not an exhaustive list, but Plato chose C) which included censored poetry, logical sounding musical scales, and abolishing the flute, an instrument which drove people to vice. Why choose C? Because despite appearances C is a much easier position to argue from. There is little ambiguity in banning the flute. There is no is-ought negotiation, which means you don't have to listen to the desires of the irrational masses. There is no subjectivity. You preempt a lot of discussions you don't want to have by hunkering down on "thing-bad." This simplifies your overall goal, which is to win arguments and look cool in front of your philosopher friends.

There's a question whether Bacon intended any psychological content to the painting you're describing. Do you have a quote or other reference showing he did? (Other than someone else's interpretation assuming this.) You gave a historical context to the work: Bacon's friend/lover died. (Did you say by suicide?) It's still an assumption, in my opinion, the work expresses Bacon's anguish. This particular work is similar to many others by Bacon, from different periods of Bacon's life, so unless you assume all of these were inspired by the same event, this death doesn't explain much, in particular. Why is it a tryptych? Is a tryptych expressive of anguish over a friend's death? I would love to hear an explanation of that.

The argument in the front of the video that visual art (painting) is better at expression that non-visual art (literature)-"Art can be much better than language at communicating emotion"-is interesting to me, considering you then quoted Tolstoy. I wonder what "better" means here? The dichotomy between Bacon's three paintings and what it would take a writer "pages" to do (0:55) feels like a false one? How do you compare the two mediums in such a way that a painting is worth X number of pages or vice versa? Literature has had a lot of the same theoretical arguments flow in and out of it in slightly different ways, from the narrative-heavy to the expressive quality to even the "formalism" of Clive Bell (often a lot at the same time, considering the pairing of, like, Sir Walter Scott's historical narratives and Jane Austen's emotional rollercoasters), and I think the narrative of those movements would be more interesting with an inclusion of how literature has expressed them rather than casting literature out of the narrative altogether as Not As Good As Painting. I think your real argument (because I don't think you're actually saying "Paintings > Books") is that visual art has a more immediate experience, but why is that immediate experience more valued, and is it even always true? There are plenty of very, very short poems out there that could provide the same immediacy of expressive communication, and even a lot of very, very short short stories. Hemingway's famous "For Sale Baby Shoes Never Worn." And if the immediate isn't inherently a value, we can consider gargantuan works like Tolstoy's own for their capabilities to do, well, all of it: express, narrate, instruct, play with form, etc. I thought a lot about Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson while writing this comment but couldn't figure out where to put it. I think it's an interesting work to consider in the narrative of expressive theory because it's main mode is anti-expression: it's a series of fragments, most of which are like historical trivia facts that have no bearing on the narrator's story, which is that she is the last human alive on earth. It's one of the most upsetting and impactful things I've ever read, and that expressive impact is done by purposefully evading expressive form. It's like if Warhol's repetitions actually made you more upset and distraught by the tragedies depicted rather than numbed. Anyway, great video as always, but I studied Lit, so I'll defend its honor.

I picture says a thousand words. YT is so profound. Here's another one: ain't nothing new under the sun. or in this case LCD monitors.

1. Regarding the Bacon painting, I keep focusing on the cursor arrow, or at least what we are now conditioned to see as a computer interface, GUI. There’s no way he meant this, but did he intend something analogous to it? 2. As for paintings that are tributes to the death of someone close to the artist, I recall other examples such as Picasso and Schnabel... each of whom I suspect had faked their emotions to some degree (yes, not a charitable interpretation, but there it is). Including Bacon, I detect a certain narcissistic coldness each had with their tribute subjects, a touch of exploitation.

I can't imagine that art that doesn't raise an emotion wouldn't be thought of but for a brief moment.

2:08 well no not really. It can, but then it can also not. and 2:20 - I can find both.

Nice content (: sometimes I feel more of a formalist, where the right use of the visual elements can have a grrat impact on the viewer regardless of the narrative. Still, the emotions one can deduce from a piece are very stimulating as well.

A painter of the Umbrian school designed upon a gesso ground / The nimbus of the baptised God / The wilderness is cracked and browned

PS: would you as an expert agree if i said "Art is to society what icing is to cake" (or find it reductive and offensive?) [What i mean is most societies/cakes are made of the same basic materials in different ratios and perhaps something that makes them, them. What adds character to that cake over everything else however is the icing, whether it says "Happy 6th Divorce Grandma or Congratulations / whether the local theatre is playing "Jesus Christ Superstar or Hamlet, whether it's slathered on or delicately designed / whether the local museum is featuring "Coco the clever chimpanzee or Monet". The icing is a piece of purposeful act of self expressionism, conveying who and what and to whom. I apologise for the rant and any and all ignorance on my part in advance, i get verbose when drunk. I do enjoy your channel ]

Hej. I've always been uncomfortable with the frictions between perceived categories like wordsmiths versus visual artists. Within literature communities there's vain glorification of poetry as the ultimate art form. And as you referred to in this video, within visual art (and dance and music) communities there's paradigms of grandeur when it comes to not needing words. It all seems pointless to me. It all seems like just different strands of art. And taste in aesthetics directing preference to which forms speak to perceivers to convey emotions or whatever it is they frame. Certain poetry for instance plays with form and suggestions of imageries. There's the narrative paintings you mentioned that further blur the lines. I can't deny there's much literature that's more like crafts, but there's plenty of examples of writers who use words to create exhibitions of experiences, via suggestions of narratives. Anyway, I wonder what your take is on the claims on "art" especially when distanced from literature. I love how dance can communicate emotions or analytical visions in ways that musicians can't, but how musicians can do so what painters can't and so forth. Maybe these individual artists can't convey what they wish to express in other ways, and thus assume their medium is therefore better or more suited than others. But I don't see how words somehow don't make the cut when it comes to defining which means art has. Or any of those distinctions. In general, it makes me weary of wanting to share whatever I express myself, as humans come up with all these separations and hierarchies. When expressing something through whatever, I love to learn from for instance art history, but detest the mine field of tribalist obstacles of inclusion/exclusion, peer and group pressure etc. I might make a collage or an installation, but can't also mention I'm working on a short story, cause you're no longer taken seriously by a the "art world". Or i might perform a poem but won't dare to share photography or a novella because of the same reasoning within the literature community. It's a game of inconsistent logics I can't seem to navigate. It's all a kaleidoscope of angles of meaning; I can appreciate these different takes on the role on emotions in your video. But it makes no sense to me how at the same time there's all the contentious frictions between claims on aesthetics. It seems it's all just ephemeral cave paintings.

I believe that its is a bit like religions. All religions express their believe of the human connection to the divine in a different way but just because there are different types of living life "the right way", that doesn't mean that if one is right that the others are therefore automatically wrong. Maybe all of the opinions you just named are right but just in a different way. One could still argue that one way is in some way more "efficient" and therefore more accurate but if you reach your goal anyways all ways are somehow legit. Its seems to be less of a "black and white" and more of a Spectrum type of question, where there a more than one legit answers.

Bro ur channel looks sweet about I’m to run it

Personally I'd say the Andy Warhol example is still portraying an emotion. Numbness and anxiety are emotions, and even a lack of emotion for something makes you feel other emotions. With Warhol It's just that the context of our modern world is absolutely key to feeling those emotions with the majority of his art I also think the transfer of a belief is still the portrayal of an emotion. You must have faith and trust in an idea to believe it, and the whole point of art designed to teach you a lesson is belief in that idea. If it was actually just about the lesson itself, instead of mostly about believing in the lesson or feeling something towards it, then it would be a graph or a rational intellectual argument of its reality. Not a painting full of striking colors and symbolism, or even a book full of poetic prose.

I am a trained and "professional" artist/painter . For me , art is about materiality - in my case, paint. The sensation and mystery of the liquidity of paint and the resistance of dry, partially shiny, primed, textured canvas ; and how this becomes fixed with time and reaches up through form (used in the widest sense) to communicate something essential about the experisnce of being human , and what lies at the heart of the human experience - the sensation of materiality in a partiulcar and fundamental situatuion of the profound beyond the veil of familiarity, or the world as it actually is (hinted). This is not "emotion", to use your term, which as a category (except in fairly extreme and clear cut observable instances of behaviours) is not a term I really understand or feel is very useful, and I don't think it can be abstracted as a reality in tself (although obviously it often is !) .The broader and more superficial meaning of the painting, is important but not essential - it could be said in other ways, and it can change and be different, for instance. A similar process is evident in poetry with relation to what might be called the musical quality of language. Of course, much contemporary visual art is not painting, but I think similar issues can be found in such offers ( as I don't practice in that way I can only speculate). It is at the heart of what constitutes art - possibly. But the heart of art is a mystery, although it can be experienced. Of necessity, this is all very briefly and simply put.

Feelings emotions talent why not.

Interesting video but at the end of it I was left with a question; what do you mean by contemporary art; apart from its literal meaning, i.e. what artists exhibit contemporarily? In that sense, all sorts of art were once contemporary which kind of renders the term "contemporary art" non-specific. So what is contemporary art? Surely it is not limited to the examples you provided. For example; What about hyperrealistic drawings? If anything art has exploded out of its Plato box everything can be called art depending on the personal values we invest in them be it a creation or an idea or just the process. If anything art has become more and more personal. I find some so-called contemporary art as nothing but a scam because I don't see anything worthy of emotional investment in them but if someone else thinks of them as art, I have no argument with them. Why do some intellectuals try to anticipate ends? It is like the end of history announced by one of them (Francis Fukuyama) at the end of the cold war. I bet he feels stupid now. As you said, art is a reflection of a specific time and space (like "truth"). So, art like history is contingent and nobody will know when it ends because we won't be around as a specie to know.

Is it also sexist to refer to work by male artists as "phallic"?