Sometimes it is said that the art is expression, and it may mean that the art does not represent the outer world, but express the inner life, i.e. feeling or emotion of the artist. Then art may be regarded as one kind of the self-expression, but is it true? Certainly art contains some symptomatic expression : for example, in the painting, touches of a brush or some partiality of a color take for the symptom of the artist's feeling. But that is the spontaneous and unconscious expression, and not the artistic expression which is deliberate embodiment of the feeling. To express, artist must at first objectify his own feeling in the consciousness, and the act of expression means ordinarily to represent the concrete situation in which he has once experienced the some concrete feeling. But to us spectator, we cannot judge that the feeling, which the work of art is expressing, is really the experienced feeling or imagined feeling, or unexpected feeling, then, from the observer's point of view, self-expression becomes an problem irrelevant to a matter.
