How difficult it is to create positive work! The easiest thing to do is always to let negative impressions lead you down the opposite path… and, worse still, when taking this opposite path, this path of the greatest effort, it often seems that the stamina is lacking, the reasoning fails and the result comes out as shocking, unsatisfactory. This unfortunate inclination can only be overcome with a lot of patience and willpower…
Tag: literature
Although, as Has Been Said, Good Literature…
Although, as has been said, good literature is always more or less autobiographical, it is useless to obsessively search in its details for parallels with the author’s experience. More often than not, experiences only serve as triggers, motifs, illustrations for something that goes beyond them in the work. That is no small feat, and it is more than enough. The rest is the exploration and deepening of the possibilities that literature allows, but that life sometimes does not.
The Most Evident Effect of the Politicization…
The most evident effect of the politicization of culture, the main manifestation of which is art, is the inhibition of creativity. In literature, the result is works that can do anything but surprise the reader. And that is where the problem arises: although a work does not necessarily have to stand out for its surprising nature in order to be good, predictability, when absolute, is simply intolerable. A work whose course is already predetermined by an ideology, whatever it may be, is a dead work, and the artists who voluntarily imprison themselves in this unfortunate cell are dead beforehand.
The Bohemian Artist Is a Falsification
By Pío Baroja:
Los pintores —añadió Larrañaga con aire agresivo— serían los menos inteligentes de los artistas si no existieran los escultores, los músicos y los cómicos, que son la quintaesencia de lo cerril. La mayoría de ellos son unos patanes llenos de suficiencia. Nada tan aburrido como un artista. Es más ameno hablar con la portera o con un tendero de comestibles. El pintor y el bohemio, como tipos amenos, ingeniosos y espirituales, son falsificaciones de nuestra época.
There is no denying it: bohemianism has given the world half a dozen geniuses and, for every one of them, the world has produced a good few thousand imbeciles. These circles, everyone knows, are always made up of would-be artists, and sporadically welcome one or two worthy of the name. But as naturally as they visit out of curiosity, they soon leave out of disappointment. A waste of time, sterility and presumption. In these circles, art is nothing more than a pretext, just like soccer, other people’s lives or politics. The bohemian artist is a falsification.