Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the struggle of artists to create works that are intentionally flawed or ugly, similar to the primal instincts of savages.
Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that both savages and modern artists share an inherent drive to produce creations that may not adhere to conventional standards of beauty. However, while savages may produce such work more instinctively, artists grapple with the challenge of crafting something that is intentionally ugly, highlighting the complexity and depth behind artistic expression.
In practice
This quote can be used during an art critique session to provoke discussion about the nature of beauty in art.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
I think you too recognize the important relationship between philosophy and art, and it is just this relationship that most painters deny. The great masters do grasp it, unconsciously; but I believe that a painter's conscious spiritual knowledge will have a much greater influence upon his art, and that it would be due only to a weakness in him, or lack of genius, should this spiritual knowledge be harmful to his art.
I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.
Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.
I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you.
Do your art. But don't wreck your art if it doesn't lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy.
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