Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of this trade: ask nothing of him. Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no-one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute.
Clive BellI will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.
Clive BellWhat quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems possibleโ significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call โSignificant Formโ; and โSignificant Formโ is the one quality common to all works of visual art.
Clive Bell