ite and talk is aesthetics; it is criticism, or
just "shop."

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal
experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion
we call works of art. All sensitive people agree that there is a
peculiar emotion provoked by works of art. I do not mean, of course,
that all works provoke the same emotion. On the contrary, every work
produces a different emotion. But all these emotions are recognisably
the same in kind; so far, at any rate, the best opinion is on my side.
That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual
art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by
pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, &c., &c., is
not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is
called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common
and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved
what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have
discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that
distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects.

For either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we
speak of "works of art" we gibber. Everyone speaks of "art," making a
mental classification by which he distinguishes the class "works of art"
from all other classes. What is the justification of this
classification? What is the quality common and peculiar to all members
of this class? Whatever it be, no doubt it is often found in company
with other qualities; but they are adventitious--it is essential. There
must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist;
possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.
What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke
our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the
windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets,
Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della
Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible--significant
form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain
forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These
relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically
moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant Form" is the
one quality common to all work