Artist

Mathematics is too arduous and uninviting a field to appeal to those to whom it does not give great rewards. These rewards are of exactly the same character as those of the artist. To see a difficult uncompromising material take living shape and meaning is to be Pygmalion, whether the material is stone or hard, stonelike logic. To see meaning and understanding come where there has been no meaning and no understanding is to share the work of a demiurge. No amount of technical correctness and no amount of labour can replace this creative moment, whether in the life of a mathematician or of a painter or musician. Bound up with it is a judgement of values, quite parallel to the judgement of values that belongs to the painter or the musician. Neither the artist nor the mathematician may be able to tell you what constitutes the difference between a significant piece of work and an inflated trifle; but if he is not able to recognise this in his own heart, he is no artist and no mathematician.

It was Homer who gave laws to the artist.

This sudden importance of art—an importance discovered by ideological movements, by the State, and by the business world—has made the artist a central figure on the public place. His earlier revolt against society, his marginal role as an entertainer, have of course predestined him to the role of an ally of all progressive movements that promise a universal society, that is, a universal public for his books, poems, paintings and partitions. His shudder before the ugliness of capitalist civilization, his isolation from the masses whose warmth and understanding he genuinely needs, make him an ideal, because uncritical, partner of the progressive ideologues who preach the overthrow of all that he hates.