representation of three-dimensional space is neither irrelevant nor
essential to all art, and that every other sort of representation is
irrelevant.

That there is an irrelevant representative or descriptive element in
many great works of art is not in the least surprising. Why it is not
surprising I shall try to show elsewhere. Representation is not of
necessity baneful, and highly realistic forms may be extremely
significant. Very often, however, representation is a sign of weakness
in an artist. A painter too feeble to create forms that provoke more
than a little aesthetic emotion will try to eke that little out by
suggesting the emotions of life. To evoke the emotions of life he must
use representation. Thus a man will paint an execution, and, fearing to
miss with his first barrel of significant form, will try to hit with his
second by raising an emotion of fear or pity. But if in the artist an
inclination to play upon the emotions of life is often the sign of a
flickering inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind
form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective sensibility always. It
means that his aesthetic emotions are weak or, at any rate, imperfect.
Before a work of art people who feel little or no emotion for pure form
find themselves at a loss. They are deaf men at a concert. They know
that they are in the presence of something great, but they lack the
power of apprehending it. They know that they ought to feel for it a
tremendous emotion, but it happens that the particular kind of emotion
it can raise is one that they can feel hardly or not at all. And so they
read into the forms of the work those facts and ideas for which they are
capable of feeling emotion, and feel for them the emotions that they can
feel--the ordinary emotions of life. When confronted by a picture,
instinctively they refer back its forms to the world from which they
came. They treat created form as though it were imitated form, a picture