Expressivist theories of art tend to focus on the imagination and emotions of the artist as the sources of creativity and originality in works of art. The essential characteristic of art is not that it represents the world, but rather that it is an expression of the unique vision, feelings, or experiences of the particular artist. The problems with expressivist views are many, but several are particularly relevant for present purposes.
What exactly it is that a work of art is thought to express? It is a disturbing but inchoate emotion seems highly implausible when dealing with works of any degree of complexity.
An inchoate emotion seems not only woefully inadequate, but also to miss what is most essential about art work.
It is the ideas of the artist which are expressed, but this is trivially true and thus decidedly uninformative. It does nothing to explain the nature of artworks, to distinguish art from non-art, or to provide criteria of judgment, but these are all tasks which various expressive theories set out to fulfil.
Expressive art is private mental processes of an artist. It is the relationship between the inchoate emotion of the artist and the work of art itself.
If the work of art is an imaginary object there is no way for the audience members to identify the public manifestation of the work of art with the private emotion of the artist.
There is no way of knowing from the work itself whether the artist went through a particular process. In focusing on private mental states and processes, expressive theories provide no criteria for identifying, characterizing, or making judgments about actual works.
A related problem concerns what it could mean for a work of art to express something, be it an emotion, an idea, or an experience.
In everyday life, expressions of emotion might include joy, happiness, tears, a scream…etc and an idea would likely be expressed by the simple stating of it.
If art is self-expression, then what is the nature of the self that is expressed? What is it that does the expressing? And what distinguishes expression of self from non-expression or the expression of something other than self?
