Sontag on ART

"Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness. Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn. But what supplies all these crises with their energy -- an energy held in common, so to speak -- is the very unification of numerous, quite disparate activities into a single genus. At the moment when "art" comes into being, the modem period of art begins. From then on, any of the activities therein subsumed becomes a profoundly problematic activity, all of whose procedures and, ultimately, whose very right to exist can be called into question."
--Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (The Aesthetics of Silence)

I live and breathe literally "on silence". I do go out from time to time, but there's no better a jit than to be locked inside a four-walled heaven, towering with books, poems, paintings and music from the eighteenth century.

Call me weird.