ABSTRACT
It is frequently said that what matters in art is emotion, both the feeling of the artist and the emotional impact of a work on its audience. If pleasure is the commonplace explanation of the value of art, expression of emotion is the commonplace view of its nature. This is a view to which we can usefully give the label ‘expressivism’. This distinguishes it from ‘expressionism’, a term widely used for a school of painting that held that painting ought to contain emotion. The two terms and the ideas they invoke are obviously connected, but expressivism is a theory that applies to art in general, and not merely to the visual arts. It is a view closely allied with nineteenth-century romanticism – the belief that true art always embodies sincere feeling – and the extensive influence of romanticism subsequently explains, at least in part, the widespread acceptance of aesthetic expressivism. In this chapter, the connection that expressivism makes between art and emotion will be explored, first in what might be called an everyday version, and then in the more sophisticated version that is to be found in R. G. Collingwood’s Principles of Art. In both cases, the crucial question will be taken to be: Can the appeal to emotion explain what is valuable about art?
