Quote of the Day

[nyuanshin]

"We realise today more and more how long and tortuous is the road from 'perception' to 'expression'. The original genius who paints 'what he sees' and creates new forms out of nothing is a Romantic myth. Even the greatest artist -- and he more than others -- needs an idiom to work in. Only tradition, such as he finds it, can provide him with the

Comments

[airstrip]

Welcome to the road towards post-Modernism in art.

[nyuanshin]

You ain't kiddin' -- bonus quote from a lecture he gave in 1962 titled "The Cartoonist's Armoury [sic]":
"Perhaps we are like children who are easily fobbed off with an answer. Any comparison that will make the unfamiliar clearer in terms of something more familiar will give us the satisfaction of pretended insight, whatever else it may stir up in us. But is this not precisely, again, what we may call the function of myth? The inquiring primitive who wants to know why the sun sets in the evening may be quite happy to learn that it is going to rest for the night, and even thunder and lightning are less unbearable if we are told of Jove's thunderbolt or electric discharges (it hardly matters which). . . . The myth-making faculty is latent in all of us; it only waits to be aroused."

[airstrip]

My insistence is that a piece of art need only allow us to make up a good story about why it should be so. The truth of the story is inconsequential, good art is a means for having a conversation with yourself, a vehicle to discuss why things may be in the guise of why they are.