We Want To Create A Sort Of

Nevertheless, What Was Made In The Hope Of Transforming The World Need Not Be Rejected Because It Failed To Do So – Otherwise, One Would Also Have To Throw Out A Good Deal Of The Greatest Painting And Poetry Of The Nineteenth Century. An Objective Political Failure Can Still Work As A Model Of Intellectual Affirmation Or Dissent.

The Basic Project Of Art Is Always To Make The World Whole And Comprehensible, To Restore It To Us In All Its Glory And Its Occasional Nastiness, Not Through Argument But Through Feeling, And Then To Close The Gap Between You And Everything That Is Not You, And In This Way Pass From Feeling To Meaning. It's Not Something That Committees Can Do. It's Not A Task Achieved By Groups Or By Movements. It's Done By Individuals, Each Person Mediating In Some Way Between A Sense Of History And An Experience Of The World.

Far From Affording Artists Continuous Inspiration, Mass-media Sources For Art Have Become A Dead End. They Have Combined With The Abstractness Of Institutional Art Teaching To Produce A Fine-arts Culture Given Over To Information And Not Experience. This Faithfully Echoes The Drain Of Concreteness From Modern Existence- The Reign Of Mere Unassimilated Data Instead Of Events That Gain Meaning By Being Absorbed Into The Fabric Of Imaginative Life.

Why Should We Expect Modernist Taste To Be Any Smarter Than Premodernist Or Postmodernist?

I Have Never Been Against New Art As Such; Some Of It Is Good, Much Is Crap, Most Is Somewhere In Between.