Art & Creativity Quote by Clive Bell

Bell’s line is a dare disguised as a reassurance: stop pretending art can be certified like a chemical compound. “No other means” is deliberately absolutist, a rhetorical barricade against the era’s favorite crutches - biography, moral lessons, historical importance, “what the artist meant,” what the market priced. As a critic writing in the early 20th century, Bell is pushing back on Victorian earnestness and the growing impulse to treat art as either uplift or information. He wants the viewer’s immediate, hard-to-translate response to be the court of first appeal.

The subtext is more radical than it first sounds. Bell isn’t saying feelings are cute add-ons; he’s claiming they’re the only tool we actually possess when we call something art. That move underwrites his wider formalist project (his famous “significant form”): the idea that the arrangement of lines, colors, and shapes can trigger an “aesthetic emotion” independent of subject matter. By centering “our feeling,” he democratizes judgment in one breath - you don’t need a priesthood of experts - and reasserts elitism in the next, because not everyone’s feelings will be equally trained, attentive, or honest.

It works because it exposes a quiet anxiety in cultural life: we want objective reasons for taste so we can argue without admitting vulnerability. Bell yanks the mask off. If recognition begins in feeling, then criticism becomes less about proving and more about refining perception - a discipline of sensibility. The quote’s bracing simplicity is the point: it corners you into admitting what you already do, before the label, the lecture, or the price tag tells you what to feel.