A New Approach to the Arts

This book considers how art actually works, how the various art forms connect with the world of ordinary human experience. Many books approach the subject from the top down, through topics such as the nature of beauty, the meaning of art, aesthetic judgement, and so on. The present book examines the subject from the ground up, so to speak, showing how the creation and appreciation of art spring from innate human needs and capacities. What we call ‘the arts’ emerge organically from the habitual activities through which human beings represent the world to themselves and others. Artistic representation, always more than mere imitation, is a reaching for the spirit of a subject, a revealing of the implicit, a refreshing of the overly familiar. A key idea is that art is representation through convention – that artistic conventions, far from inhibiting the work of the artist, are vital to artistic creativity.