Art Is Continually Working To

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

Now The Work Of Art Also Represents A State Of Final Equilibrium, Of Accomplished Order And Maximum Relative Entropy, And There Are Those Who Resent It. But Art Is Not Meant To Stop The Stream Of Life. Within A Narrow Span Of Duration And Space The Work Of Art Concentrates A View Of The Human Condition; And Sometimes It Marks The Steps Of Progression, Just As A Man Climbing The Dark Stairs Of A Medieval Tower Assures Himself By The Changing Sights Glimpsed Through Its Narrow Windows That He Is Getting Somewhere After All.

No Longer Can We Consider What The Artist Does To Be A Self-contained Activity, Mysteriously Inspired From Above, Unrelated And Unrelatable To Other Human Activities. Instead, We Recognize The Exalted Kind Of Seeing That Leads To The Creation Of Great Art As An Outgrowth Of The Humbler And More Common Activity Of The Eyes In Everyday Life. Just As The Prosaic Search For Information Is "artistic" Because It Involves Giving And Finding Shape And Meaning, So The Artist's Conceiving Is An Instrument Of Life, A Refined Way Of Understanding Who And Where We Are.

From Building A Fire One Can Learn Something About Artistic Composition. If You Use Only Small Kindling And Large Logs, The Fire Will Quickly Eat Up The Small Pieces But Will Not Become Strong Enough To Attack The Large Ones. You Must Supply A Scale Of Sizes From The Smallest To The Largest. The Human Eye Also Will Not Make Its Way Into A Painting Or Building Unless A Continuum Of Shapes Leads From The Small To The Large, From The Large To The Small.

The Rehabilitation Of Order As A Universal Principle, However, Suggested At The Same Time That Orderliness By Itself Is Not Sufficient To Account For The Nature Of Organized Systems In General Or For Those Created By Man In Particular.