Formalism and the Appearance of Nature

Abstract

The various relations between formalism and the anti-theatrical begin to emerge from these passages. The critique of the "theatrical" artist takes a number of different forms: moral, psychological, political, and aesthetic. The meaning or value of the painting is explicitly and self-consciously presented as independent of visual appearance and its "faithful" depiction, and the visual world is conceived of as "external" to the painting, as much as any instrumental aim is to the work of art as such. Fried invokes a further range of Kantian concepts in saying that "Fry imagines the finished painting to be wholly autonomous with respect to the real world." The idea of the "self-contained" is central to formalist motivations, and it bears an uneasy relation to the critical imperative to purge the description of one's experience of any dependency on what, properly speaking, lies "outside" the artwork.