Langer, Susanne K. Problems of Art. New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1957.

A dance, like any other work of art, is a perceptible form that expresses the nature of human feeling – the rhythms and connections, crises and breaks, the complexity and richness of what is sometimes called man’s “inner life,” the stream of direct experience, life as it feels to the living. (7)

What is expressed in a dance is an idea; an idea of the way feelings, emotions, and all other subjective experiences come and go – their rise and growth, their intricate synthesis that gives our life unity and personal identity. (7)

A work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and what it expresses is a human feeling. The word “feeling” must be taken here in its broadest sense, meaning everything that can be felt, from physical sensation, pain and comfort, excitement and repose, to the most complex emotions, intellectual tensions, or the steady feeling-tones of a conscious human life. (15)

Artistic forms are more complex than any other symbolic forms we know. They are, indeed, not abstractable from the works that exhibit them. We may abstract a shape from an object that has this shape, by disregarding color, weight and texture, even size; but to the total effect that is an artistic form, the color matters, the thickness of lines matters, and the appearance of texture and weight. (26)

A work of art expresses a conception of life, emotion, inward reality. But it is neither a confessional nor a frozen tantrum; it is a developed metaphor, a non-discursive symbol that articulates what is verbally ineffable – the logic of consciousness itself. (26)

One of the most widely used metaphors in the literature of art is the metaphor of the living creature applied to the artistic product. Every artist finds “life,” “vitality,” or “livingness” in a good work of art. He refers to the “spirit” of a picture, not meaning the spirit in which it was painted, but its own quality; and his first task is to “animate” his canvas. An unsuccessful work is “dead.” Even a fairly good one may have “dead spots.” What do people mean when they speak as though a picture or a building or a sonata were a living and breathing creature? (44)