Mar 11, 2010 20:02
"In the arts, the desire to find new things to say and new ways of saying them is the source of all life and interest. Yet every day we meet with examples of painting where, for instance, the artist has bound himself from the new canons of the abstract, and has displayed no intention to use to these canons to display an interesting and novel form of beauty, to pursue the uphill fight against the prevailing tendency toward the commonplace and the banal. Not all the artistic pedants are academicians. There are pedantic avantgardistes. No school has a monopoly on beauty. Beauty, like order, occurs in many places in the world, but only as a local and temporary fight against the Niagara of increasing entropy."
- Norbert Wiener (1950)
excerpt