Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.Maurice Blanchot
About This Quote
The quote above by Jean Dubuffet belongs to the category of art as religion, an art that does not lead to religion. Religion is the idea of the supernatural or god, but art is not about religion. Art should be all about expressing the human condition and understanding the human condition. Art should be an expression of life and what life is all about.
Source: The Space Of Literature
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More Quotes By Maurice Blanchot
- Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort...
- Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does...
- Why are those who knew him, when they pass from the memory of a young man, sensitive and gay, to the work — novels and writings — surprised to pass into a nocturnal world, a world of cold torment, a world not without light but...
- The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
- The authentic answer is always the question’s vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.