The Least Touchable Object In The World

Some Popular Quotations Smell Of Airless Closets. They Exhale The Stale Imagination Of The Intellectual Lower Middle Class. "suspension Of Disbelief" Has Become One Of Them. Dressed Up As A Scintillating Double Negation, It Serves The Pedestrian Notion Of Art As Illusion.

It Would Be Most Wholesome If For At Least Twenty Years Art Historians Were Forbidden To Refer To Any Derivations. If They Were Not Allowed To Account For A Work Of Art Mainly By Tracing Where It Comes From, They Would Have To Deal With It In And By Itself--which Is What They Are Most Needed For.

Since Mechanically Obtained Randomness Contains All Kinds Of Possible Permutations, Including The Most Regular Ones, It Cannot Be Relied Upon Always To Exhibit A Pervasive Irregularity.

Orderliness By Itself Is Not Sufficient To Account For The Nature Of Organized Systems In General Or For Those Created By Man In Particular. Mere Orderliness Leads To Increasing Impoverishment And Finally To The Lowest Possible Level Of Structure, No Longer Clearly Distinguishable From Chaos, Which Is The Absence Of Order. A Counterprinciple Is Needed, To Which Orderliness Is Secondary. It Must Supply What Is To Be Ordered.

In A Land Of Immigrants, One Was Not An Alien But Simply The Latest Arrival.