on the new

Sometimes I hear the complaint - one can't do anything new in art because it's all been done. This thinking has a single fundamental error :

It is that art is conceived as a process of invention. It is not. It is a process of discovery. Take the Buddhist metaphor - you're in a room looking out at the sky through a square window. You start to think maybe the sky is square. It's not of course - just walk out the door. The sky is a metaphor for the mind which like the sky is immense, vast and unfathomable and art is a function of mind.

Another way to look at it is that no matter what dimensional space you occupy, one that seems constrained by an infinite number of unsolvable problems. Jump up to a higher dimensional space and they become trivial. There is a name for this - it's called the beautiful . . . unfortunately a concept that has become somewhat deprecated today, but that is another topic . . ..

Bonington