The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic         7

elsewhere) the whole process of liberation from erroneous
conceptions of art, mounting upwards from the poorest to
the richest; and I shall cast far away, not from myself, but
from my readers, a part of the baggage with which they will
charge themselves when, prompted thereto by the sight of
the countιy passed over in our bird’s flight, they shall set
themselves to accomplish more particular voyages in this or
that part of it, or to cross it again from end to end.

However, connecting the question which has given occa-
sion to this indispensable prologue (indispensable for the
purpose of removing from my discourse every appearance
of pretentiousness, and also all blemish of inutility)—the
question as to what is art—I will say at once, in the simplest
manner, that art is vision or intuition. The artist produces
an image or a phantasm; and he who enjoys art turns his
gaze upon the point to which the artist has pointed, looks
through the chink which he has opened, and reproduces that
image in himself. “Intuition,” “vision,” “contemplation,”
“imagination,” “fancy,” “figurations,” “representations,”
and so on, are words continually recurring, like synonyms,
when discoursing upon art, and they all lead the mind to the
same conceptual sphere which indicates general agreement.

But this reply, that art is intuition, obtains its force and
meaning from all that it implicitly denies and from which it
distinguishes art. What negations are implicit in it? I shall
indicate the principal, or at least those that are the most
important for us at this present moment of our culture.

It denies, above all, that art is a physical fact: for exam-
ple, certain determined colours, or relations of colours;
certain definite forms of bodies; certain definite sounds,
or relations of sounds; certain phenomena of heat or of elec-
tricity—in short, whatsoever be designated as “physical.”

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