| What is Art?  [+ favourites]
Both the mimetic and the essentialist theories of art contain a kernel of truth. For although art necessarily deals with empirical phenomena, it is good art only to the extent that it elicits a certain response, namely the suspension of our deliberative, conscious rationality. In the damp and dusty cellar of reason, a motley army of concepts are called forth into regiments no less rough-and-ready than they are hard-and-fast. It is by partitioning reality, and imposing an order which does not belong to it, that reason proceeds; and it is my contention that it is only when we engage with a work of art that we return to the unity which inspirits everything. In short, art should not mean, but be. Works of art should be alive in the same way I am alive. They should be infused with the same elan vital. And they function by the collision of Being with Being: when we perceive a work of art we also perceive ourselves, not, to be sure, as a mirror held before us, but as something that reaches out and touches us. We become self-conscious, precisely in the way that the lap of the tide against our feet makes us more cosncious of our bodies.
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