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Sunday, May 13, 2012

The significance of the works of art and the artists

Thomas Stern Eliot, 1934. Wikipedia.org

In the essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot writes:
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.”

Quote from The Contextual Mean. By Jim Bassett Virginia Tech University

2 comments:

  1. Myriam, en términos de onda, toda obra es una ecografía.
    La voz es sólo el eco de muchas voces. En cuanto más voces asimiles y admires más intenso es el eco.

    Abrazos longitudinales.

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  2. Gracias Sergio, hermoso comentario. Quién habrá sido el primer artista de cada tema?? Un abrazo,

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