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The public
make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking
the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into
authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the
free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking
a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a
painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite
oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of
the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of
Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it
appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use
two stupid expressions—one is that the work of art is
grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is
grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to
be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they
mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that
is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they
mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that
is true.
-- Oscar Wilde,
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul
of the artist.
-- Anthony Burgess
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