In America, Nostalgia For Things

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.

It Was Van Gogh's Madness That Prevented Him From Working; The Paintings Themselves Are Ineffably Sane, If Sanity Is To Be Defined In Terms Of Exact Judgment Of Ends And Means And The Power Of Visual Analysis.

Transportation Made Sublimation Literal. It Conveyed Evil To Another World.

What We Need More Of Is Slow Art: Art That Holds Time As A Vase Holds Water: Art That Grows Out Of Modes Of Perception And Making Whose Skill And Doggedness Make You Think And Feel; Art That Isn’t Merely Sensational, That Doesn’t Get Its Message Across In Ten Seconds, That Isn’t Falsely Iconic, That Hooks Onto Something Deep-running In Our Natures. In A Word, Art That Is The Very Opposite Of Mass Media.

When The War (wwi) Finally Ended It Was Necessary For Both Sides To Maintain, Indeed Even To Inflate, The Myth Of Sacrifice So That The Whole Affair Would Not Be Seen For What It Was: A Meaningless Waste Of Millions Of Lives. Logically, If The Flower Of Youth Had Been Cut Down In Flanders, The Survivors Were Not The Flower: The Dead Were Superior To The Traumatized Living. In This Way, The Virtual Destruction Of A Generation Further Increased The Distance Between The Old And The Young, Between The Official And The Unofficial.