still life # 29 ~ form and content

winter morning window light / my living room ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenAs a follow up to the recent entries, re: narrative and concept, I thought I would post the following (as found on the web from various sources):

In art and art criticism, form and content are considered distinct aspects of a work of art. The term form refers to the work's style, techniques and media used, and how the elements of design are implemented. Content, on the other hand, refers to a work's essence, or what is being depicted ....

Works of art have subject, form and content. We often identify a work by its subject: a landscape painting, a sculpture of a young woman, a lithograph of a cat, (or a photograph of an arrangement of flowers and other stuff). Form (or design), is the visual organization of the art work -how the artist has used line, shape, value, color, etc. Content is the impact or meaning of this work ....

Because it addresses itself to our sensory appreciation, the work of art is essentially concrete, to be understood by an act of perception rather than by a process of discursive thought. At the same time, our understanding of the work of art is in part intellectual; we seek in it a conceptual content, which it presents to us in the form of an idea. One purpose of critical interpretation is to expound this idea in discursive form—to give the equivalent of the content of the work of art in another, nonsensuous idiom. But criticism can never succeed in this task, for, by separating the content from the particular form, it abolishes its individuality. The content presented then ceases to be the exact content of that work of art. In losing its individuality, the content loses its aesthetic reality; it thus ceases to be a reason for attending to the particular work of art that first attracted our critical attention. It cannot be this that we saw in the original work and that explained its power over us. For this content, displayed in the discursive idiom of the critical intellect, is no more than a husk, a discarded relic of a meaning that eluded us in the act of seizing it. If the content is to be the true object of aesthetic interest, it must remain wedded to its individuality: it cannot be detached from its “sensuous embodiment” without being detached from itself. Content is, therefore, inseparable from form and form in turn inseparable from content.