"Art for All"
Whatever is sacred, whatever is to remain sacred must be clothed in mystery. All religions take shelter behind arcana which they unveil only to the predestined. Art has it own mysteries.
We can find an example of this in music. If we open any work of Mozart, Beethoven, or Wagner and glance quickly at the first page, we will be overcome with religious astonishment at the sight of those macabre processions of rigid, chaste, and undeciphered signs. Then we will shut the missal, and it will still remain untouched by any profane thought.
Mallarme: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, & Letters. Translated by Bradford Cook. The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore. 1956. "Art for All" p 9.
2 comments:
These are very interesting musings. I may be a little off the wall here, but I am thinking about Douglas Hofstadter‘s musings where he pondered the meaning of some art like music or literature when the art is just really a bunch of code in the form of musical notation or letters in a particular language.
Brian,
Thanks for sharing that thought. It sounds like a Hofstadter musing and is thought-provoking.
Post a Comment