Response to Brycen

Therefore, a question that I pose is can art be an expression of ideas without being able to communicate to the audience?

            I think art can express ideas without communicating them to others. This occurs when someone uses art as a method of getting their own emotions out as a way to understand them. The expression helps the person who creates the art but is not intended for the viewer to understand and the viewer may not be able to understand. This is I think what Collingwood means by art as expression, art allows the artist to recognize, come to terms with and clarify their own emotions. This is not to say that art cannot be intended to communicate to the audience, but if it is the goal is probably not expression of emotions. When someone makes art with the intention of having an audience receive it a certain way, they lose the freedom to fully explore their own emotional situation. When someone uses art to express emotions they are not entirely clear on what the emotions are beforehand so they cannot make art as expression and communication. I suppose this would not be the case if someone fully understood the emotional place they were in and still felt the need to articulate it. Someone might do this if they thought it would help them move past the emotions they understand, but are still weighing them down. Then they would be expressing them with a full understanding and could have a secondary goal of showing them to an audience. People could also create a work of art originally simply because they wanted to communicate a certain emotion to the audience and it could evolve into an expression of their own emotions. They could also express emotions in such a way that it is easily communicated to an audience, but I do think it would be hard to at the same time intend to communicate to an audience and to really plumb the depths of one’s own complicated emotional reactions. I think someone could hope that their expression of emotions would be relatable to other people, even if it was not a strict communication of a certain emotion. If people made are to express emotions and impart the general idea of what they were feeling to an audience, these two goals could be compatible.

            Do you feel when viewing art that you are receiving emotional communications from the artist?