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Critics like Roger Fry and Clive Bell developed the idea of the aesthetic experience to overcome this difficulty. This idea was that the work of art stimulated a particular kind of experience - the aesthetic experience. This experience was seen as a direct perception and was seen as quite general and abstract. The aesthetic experience was not directly dependant on elements like accurate representation, or narrative, or beauty. Roger Fry was interested in how the elements of pictures formed compositions. He found that no matter how good the (say) representation was in a picture, the picture failed unless the forms of the objects represented within the picture space formed a good composition. In fact, he found, good compositions could be formed even in the absence of any recognizable forms. This of course formed a major part of the theoretical base for the abstract art of the 20th century - which created aesthetic forms that had no representational or narrative properties at all. Clive Bell was interested in the idea that an essential part of the aesthetic experience was the knowledge held by the viewer that the thing being experienced was created by another person for the purpose of stimulating an experience. For Bell, natural beauty, such as flowers, or sunsets, or a pretty face did not stimulate the aesthetic experience. An essential component of the aesthetic experience is the knowledge by the viewer that the object that they are looking at was created especially by another human for their appreciation. This is of course hard for many people to accept, because for them aesthetics just is beauty - but it makes sense - after all, a successful picture of (say) a flower has many more layers of meaning and interest than the actual flower itself. Many people will disagree with the ideas presented here. I think that art is something reasonable necessarily and understandable In fact, - many many people are committed to the idea that art is irrational. contemporary academic writers have taken the position that aesthetics is not important in art; an idea I find ugly and absurd. I invite the gentle reader to check out the galleries, and come to their own conclusion. September | October