This, I believe:
Art resides in imagination’s awareness. Art allows anything; it is touchstone, not only of its relatives apparent, not only of its cultural edifice, not only of its storied historical kin; art is touchstone of all that is human and inhuman, material and immaterial; primeval and intellectual; and art is touchstone of all that destroys these same dichotomies and of that which observes the destruction.
Art is not superfluous. It’s not outside necessity. Art is the essence and truth of both, and the only truth both malleable and indelible. Man’s work, his philosophy, his religion, his needs and desires, his politics, his history, his science, his subjectivity and attempts at its opposite are not his, and exist only in circumscribed fashion, with walls ever installed, ever transversed, ever crumbling. Man’s art is his: it requires his reflection. Though, it lives beyond him. Art lives in every space, bound and unattached, inside and outside time. We don’t create art; we record its melody—bear witness to the truth and wisdom art, and art alone, guarantees.
Art is messier than metaphor. Art is everything an artist’s statement is not. Art disappears at any attempt to capture it, define it, describe it. Art is not lingually understood; it’s supra-lingual, metaphysical. Words and their definitions have beginnings and ends. Art has no beginning, no end, no essential material form, only material manifestation to signal, flag, suggest what we can only know through a flexible, non-literal awareness.
Art can’t be adulterated. It can’t be described, analyzed. Art can only be sensed—nonverbally, nonvisually—by an all-encompassing, yet infinite, knowing. Art is always outside and in, while never residing in one place. Art is its own presenter, its viewer; it is each of their worlds and the whole from which those worlds are formed.