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Art is in this respect an entirely different domain. Like craft, art requires the exercise of skill and technique, but the artist does not have anything resembling the craftsman’s precise foreknowledge of the end state—the finished art work—when he starts out. A proper art, Colling-wood argued, is open during the creative process to a partial or complete change of direction or goal—open even to losing any sense of goal at all. The artist may change his mind, seize a new possibility, or make a surprising turn. If a poet begins to write a hymn in praise of Fidel Castro ends—even against his initial intention—with a work about the odiousness of poems in praise of dictators, we do not see the poet as any odiousness of poems in praise of dictators, we do not see the poet as competent or the poem in that respect any less a work of art.

We pay craftsmen to paint houses or repair clocks because of the of learned techniques: these people know what they are doing. could compose music faster in his mind than he could actually write down, and might therefore look to a naive observer like he was transcribing a preconceived outcome, was fully an artist in the sense described: not, after all, compose his music before he composed it. The domain craft is one of recipes, instruction books, formulas, methods, and routines. The arts, Collingwood argued, are always open to the unexpected; change in a single word or note or brushstroke can alter or even reverse only the meaning of the work but the artist’s entire objective.

Collingwood applied this craft/art distinction to the feature that considered central to the great historical arts as they have come down the expression of emotion. He distinguished the artistic expression emotion from the more craftlike practice of emotional arousal. For him, arousing an emotion is essentially a matter of trying to incite in audience some kind of general, preconceived emotional response. Arousal manipulative, which is why we speak of a formulaic movie or novel designed to elicit a predetermined sadness as a “tearjerker.” People aroused by patriotic music, melodrama, and sentimental poetry. Stage magicians can arouse surprised reactions from audiences with illusionis-tic skills, creating seemingly impossible spectacles.

The artist, on the other hand, probes the content of human emotional with an eye toward articulating, or making clear, a unique emotion, individual feeling. The endpoint may be a moment when the artist declares, “That’s it, that’s what I wanted.” But when that moment reached, it is, so to speak, discovered for the first time by the artist.

If an actress, for example, sets herself the task of arousing a kind emotional reaction in an audience, then in Collingwood’s terms she is a craft. This craft is a perfectly honorable job, requiring learning lines, taking direction, and exercising a host of skills. However, if the sets out to plumb the emotional and intellectual possibilities of a difficult or ambiguous part, if she is, say, trying to make the character’s paticular motivations and emotions clear to her audience but at the same time clear to herself, then she is at that moment engaged in the creative work of an artist. She is not simply acting out a Shakespearean part for work of an artist. She is not simply acting out a Shakespearean part for an audience, she is trying to discover what is in the soul of Lady Macbeth.

Kant said of the beautiful that it is something that “pleases without know in advance we want them to do. Kant meant that there can be preconceived idea of a beautiful novel or a beautiful piece of music same way: the work of art is not an answer to a problem out in world but an object of contemplation in the theater of the imagination makes up its own problems and supplies its own solutions. That painting with a paint-by-the-numbers set yields, in the terms described, a craft outcome, while committing to a blank canvas an entirely new, imaginative rendering of the Mojave Desert is an art. As art, cannot