THE EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY For the aesthetically creative mind art is the transformation of the common world of perceptual experience into the unique realm of imaginative thought plus its adequate recording in some material form. Art is the reconstruction of the factual universe into an ideational universe in conformity with the needs of a creative mind. That is its service to the artist. It is his way of life. But what service does it render the lay mind? What is the source of its universal appeal to the non-artist? What widespread common need does it satisfy? What impulse, what urge, sends the proverbial man of the street to art? To say that he goes to art for recreation is but to raise the question: recreation from what? If he seeks recreation through art there must be some destructive element in his life for which art is an antidote. What is that disintegrating element, and in what way does art reintegrate it? What do we lose in our daily, ordinary contacts that art restores to us and so restores us? In a word, what is there in human nature that calls for art? We shall attempt an answer to these questions by a study of the nature of the experience of beauty. To the layman, that which the artist produces is art only when he can report that it is beautiful, and therefore it is his need for beauty that art serves. If, then, we can obtain a clear idea of what he means by beauty we have a key to that part of his nature to which art appeals. The experience of beauty, like all complete experience, is complex in structure. It is composed of a number of elements, each of which is easily mistaken for the whole. Hence we have numerous so-called theories of beauty, each theory calling attention to one of its component ingredients, and disregarding, more or less, the other constituents. It is this condition that has given rise in the minds of the uncritical to the notion that aestheticians contradict each other, and hence, that beauty is indefinable. But aestheticians no more contradict each other than do chemists when they study some perplexing compound and report its several elements. The aesthetic theories are supplementary, and it is only when we put all of them together that we obtain an idea of the nature of the experience of beauty in its totality. Pevsner		Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty The Substance of the Experience of Beauty The Service of Art Art As Release The Theories of Beauty Beauty in Music Painting Poetry