In A Land Of Immigrants, One Was

Now The Work Of Art Also Represents A State Of Final Equilibrium, Of Accomplished Order And Maximum Relative Entropy, And There Are Those Who Resent It. But Art Is Not Meant To Stop The Stream Of Life. Within A Narrow Span Of Duration And Space The Work Of Art Concentrates A View Of The Human Condition; And Sometimes It Marks The Steps Of Progression, Just As A Man Climbing The Dark Stairs Of A Medieval Tower Assures Himself By The Changing Sights Glimpsed Through Its Narrow Windows That He Is Getting Somewhere After All.

Some Popular Quotations Smell Of Airless Closets. They Exhale The Stale Imagination Of The Intellectual Lower Middle Class. "suspension Of Disbelief" Has Become One Of Them. Dressed Up As A Scintillating Double Negation, It Serves The Pedestrian Notion Of Art As Illusion.

From Building A Fire One Can Learn Something About Artistic Composition. If You Use Only Small Kindling And Large Logs, The Fire Will Quickly Eat Up The Small Pieces But Will Not Become Strong Enough To Attack The Large Ones. You Must Supply A Scale Of Sizes From The Smallest To The Largest. The Human Eye Also Will Not Make Its Way Into A Painting Or Building Unless A Continuum Of Shapes Leads From The Small To The Large, From The Large To The Small.

Orderliness By Itself Is Not Sufficient To Account For The Nature Of Organized Systems In General Or For Those Created By Man In Particular. Mere Orderliness Leads To Increasing Impoverishment And Finally To The Lowest Possible Level Of Structure, No Longer Clearly Distinguishable From Chaos, Which Is The Absence Of Order. A Counterprinciple Is Needed, To Which Orderliness Is Secondary. It Must Supply What Is To Be Ordered.

A Cloud Can Look Like A Camel, But A Camel Is Unlikely To Look Like A Cloud. This Is So Because The Signifier Must Be Able To Stand For The Whole Category Of The Signified. The Cloud Looks Like All Camels, But No Camel Looks Like All Clouds.