Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 37))

WHAT IS THE OBJECT OF ART?*
WHAT is the object of art? Could reality come into direct contact
with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate com-
munion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be use-
less, or rather we should all be artists, for then our soul would continually
vibrate in perfect accord with nature. Our eyes, aided by memory, would
carve out in space and fix in time the most inimitable of pictures. Hewn in
the living marble of the human form, fragments of statues, beautiful as the
relics of antique statuary, would strike the passing glance. Deep in our souls
we should hear the strains of our inner life’s unbroken melody,—a music that
is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original. All this
is around and within us, and yet no whit of it do we distinctly perceive. Be-
tween nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness
a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,—thin,
almost transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil?
Was it done in malice or in friendliness ? We had to live, and life demands that
we grasp things in their relations to our own needs. Life is action. Life implies
the acceptance only of the utilitarian side of things in order to respond to them
by appropriate reactions; all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach
us vague and blurred. I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I
examine myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But
what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection
made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct; what I know of
myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions. My
senses and my consciousness, simplification of reality. In the vision they
furnish me of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to
man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are em-
phasized; ways are traced out for me in advance along which my activ-
ity is to travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod
before me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive
from them. And it is this classification I perceive, far more clearly than
the color and the shape of things. Doubtless man is vastly superior to the
lower animals in this respect. It is not very likely that the eye of the
wolf makes any distinction between a kid and a lamb; both appear to the
wolf as the same identical quarry, alike easy to pounce upon, alike good to
devour. We, for our part, make a distinction between a goat and a sheep;
but can we tell one goat from another, one sheep from another? The individ-
uality of things or of beings escapes us, unless it is materially to our advantage
to perceive it. Even when we do take tnote of it—as when we distinguish
one man from another—it is not the individuality itself that the eye grasps,
i.e. an entirely original harmony of forms and colors, but only one or two fea-
tures that will make practical recognition easier.
In short, we do not see the actual things themselves; in most cases we
confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them. This tendency, the

*From “Laughter,” by Henri Bergson.