If nature is like art

But if nature is like art, this is always because it combines these two living elements in every way: House and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich, territory and deterritorialization, finite melodic compounds and the great infinite plane of composition, the small and large refrain.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 'Percept, Affect, Concept' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2016) p. 114

Perhaps art begins with the animal

Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (both are correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habitat). The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions – sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain the appearance of the territory and the house; rather it is the other way around: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 'Percept, Affect, Concept' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2016) p. 112

I write for my own contentment

Besides, I would have thought that the same thing applied to singing as has been said about poetry here in Iceland: 'I write for my own contentment and not my own aggrandizement'.

Halldor Laxness, The Fish Can Sing (Vintage Books, 2014) p. 238

The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

[...]

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading believe every word of it. Finally, when we are done with it, we may find – if it's a good novel – that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But its' very hard to say just what we learned, how we are changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Introduction' in The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. xvi

They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful

They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It’s all simply a matter of degree. An Earth Man thinks: ‘In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of things I happen to see.’ A Martian, far cleverer, would say: ‘This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and the mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (HarperCollins, 1995) p. 109

The pursuit of art is the pursuit of liberty

The pursuit of art, then, by artist or audience, is the pursuit of liberty. If you accept that, you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts, labelling them as "escapism". The captured soldier tunnelling out of prison, the runaway slave, and Solzhenitsyn in exile, are escapists. Aren't they? The definition also helps explain why all healthy children can sing, dance, paint, and play with words; why art is an increasingly important element in psychotherapy; why Winston Churchill painted, why mothers sing cradle-songs, and what is wrong with Plato's Republic.

Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 6

En enda förblivande konst

Min gamla tanke är att konsten inte är en benämning på en kategori eller ett område, som omfattar en oöverskådlig mängd begrepp och sig förgrenande företeelser, utan tvärtom någonting starkt begränsat och koncentrerat, att den betecknar en grundprincip, som ingår i vad man sammanfattar i begreppet konstnärlig framställning, att den är en benämning på en kraft som där kommer till användning eller på en däri utvecklad sanning. Och konsten har aldrig tyckts mig vara ett formtema, en sida av formen utan fastmer en hemlighetsfull och fördold del av innehållet. Detta är för mig klart som dagen, jag känner det med varje fiber, men hur skall jag uttrycka och klart formulera denna tanke?

Verken kommer till tals på många sätt: genom sina teman, sina teser, sina ämnen och hjältar. Men framför allt talar de genom närvaron av den konst som de innehåller. Konstens närvaro på sidorna i "Brott och Straff" skakar oss mer än Raskolnikovs brott.

Den primitiva konsten, den egyptiska, den grekiska, vår tids konst, allt detta är förvisso under loppet av många årtusenden ett och detsamma, en enda förblivande konst. Den är ett slags tanke, ett slags påstående om livet, som i sin allomfattande vidd inte kan sönderdelas i enstaka ord, och när ett uns av denna kraft ingår som en beståndsdel i en mer komplicerad blandning, kommer tillsatsen av konst att väga upp betydelsen av allt det övriga och visa sig vara den innersta kärnan, själen och grunden i framställningen.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 310

The name is the only thing that remains constant

It never occurs to people that the one who finishes something is never the one who started it, even if both have the same name, for the name is the only thing that remains constant.

José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (The Harvill Press, 1998) p. 37

The secret of deep human sympathy

Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty – it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children – in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world – those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things – men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers – more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent and in other respects is not an Oberlin or Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.

George Eliot, Adam Bede (Penguin Popular Classics, 1994) pp. 177-178

The capability of the artist

SOPHIE: But surely it is a fact about art – regardless of the artist's subject or his intentions – that it celebrates a world which includes itself – I mean, part of what there is to celebrate is the capability of the artist.
MARTELLO: How very confusing.
SOPHIE: I think every artist willy-nilly is celebrating the impulse to paint in general, the imagination to paint something in particular, and the ability to make the painting in question.
MARTELLO: Goodness!
SOPHIE: The more difficult it is to make the painting, the more there is to wonder at. It is not the only thing, but it is one of the things. And since I do not hope to impress you by tying up my own shoelace, why should you hope to have impressed me by painting a row of black strips on a white background?

Tom Stoppard, 'Artist Descending a Staircase' in Plays Two (Faber and Faber, 1996) p. 139

Horizons of expectations

We will not reclaim a future qualitatively different form the present by reinvesting in the idea of horizon. At its best, contemporary art models experimental practices of negation that puncture horizons of expectations.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 211

History is inherently utopian

History is about the future in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is only from the standpoint of a particular future that the ultimate object of history – the unity of the human – can be thought. In this respect, history (like art) is inherently utopian. This is something that ties art to history. It is beyond the scope of all actually existing social subjects.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 194

Art creates demand

'It has always been one of the primary tasks of art', Benjamin argued, 'to create a demand whose hour of satisfaction has not yet come.' It is as demand that art functions politically. Boredom intensifies the demand.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 184

Art and distraction

But if what art must distract its viewers from – in order to function critically as art – is not just the cares and worries of the world, but, increasingly, distraction (entertainment) itself, how to distract from distraction without simply reproducing it? How is art to be received in distraction without becoming just another distraction? Alternatively, how is art to distract from distraction without losing touch with distraction, without entering another realm altogether? – 'contemplative immersion' in the work – with no relation to other distractions, and thereby becoming the vehicle of a flight from actuality, from the very temporal structure of experience which it must engage with if it is to be 'contemporary' and affective?

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 178

The trick is to be at home in many homes

It is not true, the novelist and the philosopher suggest in unison, that great art has no homeland – on the contrary, art, like the artists, may have many homelands, and most certainly more than one. Rather than homelessness, the trick is to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy with the critical look of an outsider, involvement with detachment – a trick which sedentary people are unlikely to learn. Learning the trick is the chance of the exile: technically an exile – one that is in, but not of the place. The unconfinedness that results from this condition reveals the homely truths to be man-made and un-made, and the mother tongue to be an endless stream of communication between generations and a treasury of messages always richer than any of their readings and forever waiting to be unpacked anew.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 207

To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar

Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilised countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only to pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise, their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonour, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable ”windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The artist shares

But how can they justify this kind of censorship? You write music! Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behaviour we're capable of. It's certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, buy the nature of any art, it's a sharing. The artist shares, it's the essence of his act.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 146

Artists are terrible people

Artists in my experience are not willing to wait for revolutionary change in order to express their sensuous beings and so are disloyal to communities of politics. Debord was right to expel them. They're terrible people.

Roman Vasseur, No Room To Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City (Mute Books, 2010) p. 123

The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped in to them

Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a hidden 'it should be otherwise'. When a work of art is merely itself and no other thing, as in a pure pseudo-scientific construction, it becomes bad art – literally pre-artistic. The form of true volition, however, is mediated through nothing other than the form of the work itself, whose crystallization becomes an analogy of that other condition which should be. As eminently constructed and produced objects, works of art, including literary ones, point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just life. This mediation is not a compromise between commitment and autonomy, nor a sort of mixture of advanced formal elements with an intellectual content inspired by genuinely or supposedly progressive politics. The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped in to them; if anything, it is the opposite.

Theodor Adorno, 'Commitment' in Utopias (ed. by Richard Noble) (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2009) p. 48

The time for civilisation is past

We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as God's steward, then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure destroyed more than we were even aware of. The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly and bites down hard as it records – this is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge for writing – for art – to meet. This is what we are here for.

Paul Kingsnorth & Dougald Hine, 'Uncivilisation – The Dark Mountain Manifesto' on The Dark Mountain Project, http://dark-mountain.net/ (15/03/2015)