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Pearls from artists* # 465
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn proposed that if art has never been revealed its intrinsic “function” to us, it is because such a thing is beyond our ken. For the Russian writer, we are mistaken when we call art a human innovation; we ought instead to see it as a gift, something that came to us from beyond the bounds of our world. Solzhenitsyn illustrates his point by comparing the work of art to the technological marvel that a man from the proverbial Stone Age comes across in the wilderness. Unable to penetrate its secrets, the man can only turn the object this way and that, looking for “some arbitrary use to which he can put it, without suspecting an extraordinary one.” Solzhenitsyn goes on:
“So also we, holding art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters, boldly we direct it, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement… and at another… for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives us a part of its secret inner light.”
JF Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 259
In Bolivia on Lake Titicaca
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In college, I made two important decisions about my career.
First, I would put my writing on the back burner until I became well established in science. I know of a few scientists who later became writers, like C.P. Snow, Rachel Carson, but no writers who later became scientists. For some reason, science – at least the creative, research side of science – is a young person’s game. In my own field, physics, I found that the average age at which Nobel Prize winners did their prize-winning work was only thirty-six. Perhaps it has something to do with the focus on and isolation of the subject. A handiness for visualizing in six dimensions or for abstracting the motion of a pendulum favors an agility of mind but apparently requires little knowledge of the human world. By contrast, the arts and humanities require experience with life and the awkward contradictions of people, experience that accumulates and deepens with age.
Alan Lightman in A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
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