Clive Bell said representation is irrelevant in art. Can anyone still hold that?

I draw picture books and some manga in Osaka. A friend lent me Clive Bell's Art (1914), and I've been arguing with it all week.

Bell says what all real works of visual art share is "significant form": lines and colours combined in a way that moves us with a special aesthetic emotion. What a picture represents is, at best, irrelevant to its value as art, and often a distraction.

For a picture-book artist this is almost insulting. The story is the point. A child isn't moved by my lines and colours as such; she's moved by the fox who loses his mother.

But then I look at Hokusai's great wave and catch myself staring at the curve and the claw-like foam, not thinking about the boats at all. Bell has a point there.

And there's the problem everyone mentions: significant form is defined as what produces the aesthetic emotion, and the aesthetic emotion is defined as the response to significant form. Is there any version of formalism that escapes that circle and still says something worth defending?