Artistic freedom

“ With them art is inseparable from utility and communal activities, upon which it has an immediate modifying or strengthening effect. The movement of civilization, with the exception of the Greek, mediaval, and renaissance city states, has involved a breaking away from this original unity until, among ourselves, art is developed and enjoyed in isolation from the rest of life. Art is valued for its own sake, for its contribution to culture, not for any further influence upon life, and this freedom has come to be part of its very meaning. ”

“ If we find ourselves influenced to a particular course of action, that is a sure sign that the art was bad. Nevertheless,—and here lies the kernel of the whole discussion, so far as it bears upon education,—the aesthetic state is a necessary stage in the restoration of imperilled freedom. ”

“ Slowly we see the idea die out that only the nobles and the wealthy had the right to life, liberty and happiness, and we see the ideas of freedom and equality taking the place of serfdom and slavish obedience to over-lords. All this may seem strange to appear in a book on music but art always mirrors the life and feelings of the people of its time. ”

“ The time for it has come, and it would be strange if, in this age, liberty, like the light, should penetrate everywhere except to the one place where freedom is most natural—the domain of thought. Let us take the hammer to theories and poetic systems. Let us throw down the old plastering that conceals the façade of art. There are neither rules nor models; or, rather, there are no other rules than the general laws of nature, which soar above the whole field of art, and the special rules which result from the conditions appropriate to the subject of each composition. ”

“ The arts, which it judges, have an identical origin and an indistinguishable intent, but they are properly its subordinates because they have not its purity. They, too, aim at remodeling discordant nature into harmony with human nature. They, too, are dominated by value-forms which shall satisfy as nearly as possible all interests, 437 shall liberate and fulfil all repressions, and shall supply to our lives that unity, eternity, spirituality, and freedom which are the exfoliations of our central desire—the desire to live. ”

“ You remember what he said to the German people: ‘Only have the courage,’ he said, ‘to give yourselves up to your impressions, allow yourselves to be delighted, moved, elevated, nay instructed, inspired for something great.’ The courage to give yourselves up to your impressions: yes, that is the secret of the artistic life—for while art has been defined as an escape from the tyranny of the senses, it is an escape rather from the tyranny of the soul. ”

“ But let me not become too remote or fine-spun in my conception of the ultimate significance of art itself. The point which I wish to make is just this: that in a land so devoted to the material, although dedicated by its Constitution to the ideal, the condition of intellectual freedom, let alone art, is certainly anomalous. Your trade and your trust builder, most obviously dominant in America at this time, is of all people most indifferent to, or most unconscious of, the ultimate and pressing claims of mind and spirit as expressed by art. ”

“ The rights of literature, the servant of eternal beauty, do not destroy the rights of the literature of indictment, which always accompanies social deficiencies and sometimes appears as the healer of social evils....
Of course, Art is perfectly free: it finds its justification and its aim in itself. But the freedom of Art in the abstract, has nothing to do with the inner life of the artist. ”

“ I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few. ”

“ And therefore the question which involuntarily presents itself to every man free from artistic activity and therefore not bound to existing art by self-interest, the question asked by me at the beginning of this work: Is it just that to what we call art, to a something belonging to but a small section of society, should be offered up such sacrifices of human labor, of human lives, and of goodness as are now being offered up? ”

“ Art that disregards the laws and limits... is no longer art: it is factory work, trade.... Whoever... departs from the laws of beauty, and from the feeling for aesthetic harmony that each man senses within his breast... is sinning against the original wellsprings of art. ”

“ But, as in your cities so in your literature, it is a permanent canon and standard of taste, an increased sensibility to beauty (if I may say so) that is lacking. All noble work is not national merely, but universal. The political independence of a nation must not be confused with any intellectual isolation. The spiritual freedom, indeed, your own generous lives and liberal air will give you. From us you will learn the classical restraint of form.
For all great art is delicate art, roughness having very little to do with strength, and harshness very little to do with power. ”

“ The arts lie at the heart of our Nation and of the heritage we cherish. The freedom we enjoy allows our arts to breathe the spirit of liberty and to ennoble, inspire, and nourish us. During National Arts Week, when we celebrate the arts and thank the artists, patrons, and audiences who give them life, we salute a precious dimension of America. ”

“ But it is also true that, among some nations, their most vigorous and freest times have been the very blossoming times of art: while at the same time, I must allow that these decorative arts have flourished among oppressed peoples, who have seemed to have no hope of freedom: yet I do not think that we shall be wrong in thinking that at such times, among such peoples, art, at least, was free; when it has not been, when it has really been gripped by superstition, or by luxury, it has straightway begun to sicken under that grip. ”

“ And the artists producing art will not be, as now, merely a few people selected from a small section of the nation, members of the upper classes or their hangers-on, but will consist of all those gifted members of the whole people who prove capable of, and are inclined towards, artistic activity. ”

“ The great writers in the great ages, standing above classicism and above romanticism, 182have always observed this decorum and orderliness. In their hands such observance was not a servile and rigid adherence to external rules, but a beautiful convention, an instinctive fine breeding, such as is naturally observed in human intercourse when it is not broken down by intimacy or by any great crisis of life or of death.
The freedom of art by no means involves the easiness of art. ”

“ Midway between liberty and license, in literature as in morals, stands the pivot of good taste, the centre-point of art. The natural inclination of frankness, the inclination of the virtue in the rough, is to blunder on resolutely with an indomitable and damning sincerity, till all is said that can be said, and art is lost in photography. ”

“ Happy days of the present, blessed revolution of modern life, that dignifies the artist, and places him under the protection of the public, an impersonal sovereign that leaves the creator of beauty free and ends by even following him in new-created paths! ”

“ But now, suppose you are an artist—and I use the word to cover all sorts of art, literary, dramatic and musical, as well as painting, sculpture, design and architecture—you want before all things freedom for personal expression, and you probably have an idea that this is the last thing you will get in the Socialist State. ”

“ Eventually, the public, which has lost the habit of seeing the actual artistic fact in the controlling of depicting power, in the organising mastery over all art-means, must come ever more and more to value power for power's sake, colour for colour's sake, idea for idea's sake, inspiration for inspiration's sake ; accordingly it will not enjoy the elements and conditions of the work of art, unless isolated, and finally will make the very natural demand that the artist must deliver it to them isolated. ”

“ All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for the voice of humanity, these appeals to art ‘to have a mission,’ are appeals which should be made to the public. The art which has fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions: it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the calm of such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions. ”

“ nay, that, to arrive at a solution even in the political problem, the road of aesthetics must be pursued, because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom. ”

“ If you would have fine art and fine appreciation of art, you must have a fine free life for your artists and for yourselves. That is another thing that Society can do for art: it can kill the middle-class ideal. ”

“ The deepest social difficulty of our time is here drawn through the meshes of the artist's imagination and, purged of everything inessential, set out in vibrating colour and line far more appealing and convincing than all the statistical statements of the lords of rule. The failure of our modern legislation to realize the value of art in any hope of national regeneration is not the least of its blunders. ”

“ I mention them because it is often supposed, from the destructive effects which attend the first advent of democratic principles where they have to explode their way into existence through masses of ancient rubbish, that popular liberty is unfavorable to art. It never could be so in France, because the whole body of the people are more thoroughly artistic in their tastes and feelings than in most countries. ”

“ The more completely the artist is freed from the pressure of public taste and opinion, from the hope of rewards and the menace of morals, from the fear of absolute starvation or punishment, and from the prospect of wealth or popular consideration, the better for him and the better for art, and therefore the better for everyone. Liberate the artist: here is something that those powerful and important people who are always assuring us that they would do anything for art can do. ”

“ In a summary discussion such as the present, many such questions—regarding the future of art and of culture itself, the nature and prospects of art in a democratic society, the fate of the individual today—will of necessity remain virtually untouched. ”

“ According to his lights he ever stood up for the dignity of his art, with the same unflinching independence of character with which he claimed, not without personal risk, the rights of a free citizen. ”

“ But the voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself boldly above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. ”

“ There is to-day the inward interest which unites art and society, but that which brought power and glory to those other deep agitations, is destroyed. The social art has gone and has not yet returned. Whom do we principally meet in these days? Sculptors? No, the manufacturers of statues. Painters? No, the manufacturers of pictures. Musicians? No, the manufacturers of music. Everywhere artisans, nowhere artists. ”

“ That a great nation should deliberately discourage the importation of beautiful things, should wallow in the mire of ugliness and refuse to be cleansed by art, was to him a mystery,—for what difference does it make whether painting, poetry, and music come out of the East or out of the West, so long as they add to the happiness of a people? And why should painting and sculpture find the gate closed when poetry and music are admitted? ”

“ It is, I understand and believe, pretty much the same in more modern institutions for the encouragement of the Fine Arts. The end is lost in the means: rules take place of nature and genius; cabal and bustle, and struggle for rank and precedence, supersede the study and the love of art. ”

“ Let the musician and him who knows literature challenge the work of art for a violation of any of these and the judgment which results may be accepted seriously; and yet the essence lies beyond—with nature herself. ”

“ When art reached a state of so-called perfection, commercial, physical and religious supremacy of the nation dimmed—because the foundation for that art was not made of common sense rules but fantastic and self-indulgent exceptions. Let the foundation for art be moral even if limited to begin with, inspired by self-sacrifice and with sincerity its determining motif and that nation can advance in art without fear of decadence. ”

“ Look where one will, can one find the self-evidently necessary task that awaits such an artist? We go through all the exhibitions, the concerts, the theatres, and find only industrious cobblers and noisy fools, who delight to produce something for the market, something that will “catch on” with a public for whom art and music and drama have long ceased to be spiritual necessities. At what a level of inward and outward dignity stand to-day that which is called art and those who are called artists! ”

“ Classic art was like a king who has the right to govern, punish, reward, and choose his favorites from an aristocracy, obliging them to adopt conventional rules as to manners, morals, and modes of speech. The new art tries to imitate nature in its unconsciousness, its moral indifference. ”