Individual formor what some have called the organic unity of the elements
of a single work is closer to being a distinctive mark of exemplary artistic
achievement. As Dewey puts it,“In a work of art, different acts, episodes,
occurrences melt and fuse into a unity, and yet do not disappear and lose
their own character as they do so.”^36 In the distinctly successful work, that is
to say, the different elements–for example, musical motifs, apples presented
in impasto, beams and girders, occurrent thoughts in a protagonist of lyric–
seem somehow to“fit”one another and the overall subject matter and
expressive tenor of the work. The formal elements seem to require one
another in just their particular places in the work. Any substitution or
alteration of them would diminish the work’s solicitation of and support
for absorbed perception.
Beardsley’s theory of individual form
Monroe Beardsley has developed the most detailed theory of the achievement
of individual form in the various media of art. He takes being intended,
through formal arrangement, to solicit and sustain an aesthetic experience
or an absorption in formal arrangement as the definition of art.
My answer [to the question,“What is art?”] is that an artwork is an
arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience
with a marked aesthetic character–that is, an object (loosely speaking) in
the fashioning of which the intention to enable it to satisfy the aesthetic
interest played a significant causal part...Experience has a marked aesthetic
character when it has some of the following features, including the first
one: attention firmly fixed on a perceptual or intentional object; a feeling of
freedom from concerns about matters outside that object; notable affect
that is detached from practical ends; the sense of powers of discovery; and
integration of the self and of its experiences.^37This definition clearly echoes both Kant’s account of the art object’s
appealing to our cognitive powers in perception, without having any further
purpose, and Dewey’s account of how, in attending to art, we focus on the
organization of perceptual qualities for its own sake. Beardsley adds that a
(^36) Ibid., p. 36. (^37) Beardsley,Aesthetics, pp. xix, lxii.
Beauty and form 63