We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
CLOSE UP
245
When we say " This is beautiful " we mean " This causes in us an experience which is valuable in certain ways." To describe the value of the experience is criticism : criticism is a branch of psychology and no special ethical or metaphysical idea need be introduced to explain value. To postulate the aesthetic experience makes an easy step to the postulation of a peculiar and unique aesthetic value : this way, the world rapidly fills with bogus entities.
Richards has shown us that an experience is valuable when it satisfies an appetency without involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency. And Richards is quick to assure us that the view of the mind as a system of impulses should not be called Materialism : it might equally be called Idealism as neither term in this connection has any scientific or strictly symbolic meaning or reference. Both the experience of a toothache and the experience of a sunspot are due to neural changes : yet these neural changes retain their privilege to be the most interesting of all events.
So, the arts are not substitution, not built from the play motif or propaganda (Oh ! lens workers !), but are the best available data for deciding which experiences are valuable. For the artist is the man who lacks inhibitions, who has integrated responses so that he lives fully, who has cleaily seen the varying possibilities of existence and organized the whole. The artist knows experience at its highest : the arts are an appraisal of existence, a storehouse of recorded values.
Attacks against taste are dangerous, as Richards remarks, because they appeal to a natural instinct — hatred of superior persons. Yet bad taste and crude responses are at the root of all evil : the rearguard of society cannot be extricated until the vanguard has gone further. To put it in the most practical terms for the Russian propagandist school of cinema : a step in mathematical accomplishment facilities a new turn in ski-ing.
The punishment of bad taste is to be shut off from wide ranges of valuable experience. The man who is satisfied with British films is debarred from appreciation of other things which he would enjoy far more if he could enjoy them ! It is adults not children who suffer most from bad movies : no adult can enjoy the crude experiences of the bad film without suffering a disorganisation which has its effects in everyday life. It is the false theory of the severance and disconnection between "aesthetic" and ordinary experience which has prevented this danger from being understood. As Richards sums up : an improvement of a response is the only benefit which anyone can receive, the degradation of a response the only calamity.
Therefore, readers of Close Up should start a serious boycott against certain firms (who certainly shall be nameless but who will be readily discovered by the film fan) because they make no effort to raise the quality of their movies from that of the novelette. In contrast, readers should write to that excellent firm, Paramount, and congratulate the supervisors on their efforts to provide better and different films. Not only have Paramount given us the Four Marx Brothers and Mae West, but recent Paramount