Since the artist proper has something to do with emotion, and what he does with it is not to arouse it, what is it that he does?, …
Nothing could be more entirely commonplace than to say he expresses them…
To state it is not to state a philosophical theory or definition of art; it is to state a fact or supposed fact about which, when we have sufficiently identified it, we shall have later to theorize philosophically.
When a man is said to express emotion, what’s being said about him comes to this. At first, he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what that emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going in within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant.
While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is: “I feel… I don’t know what I feel.” From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity that has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It has also something to do with the consciousness: the emotion expressed is an emotion of which whose nature the person who feels it is no longer unconscious. It has also something to do with the way in which he feels the emotion.
As unexpressed, he feels it in a way that we have called a helpless and oppressed way; as expressed he feels it in a way from which this sense of oppression is vanished. His mind is somehow light and eased.
This lightening of emotions which is somehow connected with the expression of them has a certain resemblance to the “catharsis” by which emotions are earthed through being discharged” (Collingwood, R.G. 1997)
Goldblatt, D., & Brown, L. (1997). Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts.
-Yogabrofessor
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