choreographers, novelists, poets and so on can reflectively attend to andwork
withemotional states asshown(in any of these senses)ina motive, contour,
description, line, or image. But here too, as in Robinson’s account, what is
then donewithmotives, contours, and so on will matter for distinctively
artistic expressiveness and success. As in Robinson’s account, the initial
emotionally expressive material (and the subject matter it presents) must
be individuated, articulated, elaborated, and clarified^110 in ways that are
inseparable from the generation of compelling form.
The moral we should draw from all these accounts is that artistic expres-
siveness is not fully explicable in psychodynamic terms alone, in physio-
gnomic terms alone, or in formal terms alone. Felt response, patterns of
emotion and attitude, and formal success all matter to artistic expressive-
ness. Felt response or attitude toward a subject matter must be blended with
cognitive attention to it, over and above raw feeling and its mere discharge.
Felt response or attitude and cognitive attention together must be sustained
and developed through the articulate working of materials to generate over-
all artistic presentational form. With this result in hand, we are now able to
address more clearly the question of why artistic expression matters to us.
Why does artistic expression matter?
In an individualistic and therapeutic age, we are likely to think at first blush
that expression matters as a form of relief: the discharge of some burden-
some feeling that would otherwise fester and corrupt the psyche. Whatever
the merits of such a view of expression as therapy, however, it does not
account for the interest or importance of distinctively artistic expression.
Though they form a continuum, what distinguishes artistic expression from
ordinary expression–as theorists from Aristotle to Collingwood to Dewey
have emphasized–is a process of arriving at increased focus on and clarity
about what one feels. Therapeutic discharge may sometimes bring increased
focus and clarity as well, but it rarely does so in and through the virtuosic
working of materials. When it does so, it begins to verge on artistic dramatic
monologue or standup comedy. How and why, then, might artistic expres-
sion matter over and above immediate therapy?
(^110) Robinson,Deeper than Reason, pp. 270–71.
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