/lit/ - Literature

>The material never saves a work of art, the gold it is made of does not hallow a statue.
Here he is talking about physical material, but he umbrellas the material and the subject being represented together because they are both parts of the unavoidable foundation upon which art must be built. That foundation is not what makes it art.

>A work of art lives on its form, not on its material; the essential grace it emanates springs from its structure, from its organism.
The elegant way an author dances around their subject, or artist forms curves and ridges out of material or colored paint as a means of showing emotion towards the subject they are representing-- that is the substance of art.
The means of doing that interpretive dance is through imposing structures that are more complex than the subject.

>The structure forms the properly artistic part of the work, and on it aesthetic and literary criticism should concentrate.
Someone who criticizes or praises something for its subject matter, political or otherwise, is uncultured and has shit opinions. They are like someone who calls a statue of a coked-out fatass beautiful solely because it is made of gold.

>If too much stress is laid on the subject of a painting or a poem, sensitive nerves smell the Philistine.
If art is purely about the subject, it isn't art. Textbooks are not typically art, for example.

>No doubt, as there is no life without chemical processes, thus there is no work of art without a subject.
Acknowledging that a subject and physical material is necessary for it to exist, obviously.

>Just as life cannot be reduced to chemistry but begins to be life only when it has imposed upon the chemical laws other original processes of new and more complex order, so the work of art is what it is thanks to the form it imposes upon the material or subject.
This is a summary.

I made it even longer.
For those debating, following this logic you seem to be conflating monetary value with artistic value. If you copy the mona lisa in all of its detail(not just a flat image), it retains the same artistic value.

>>18240121
Yes.
Drugs make everything better.
Stop being retarded and take proper doses instead of boofing yourself into a coma every single time.
You can be on something without raising your tolerance one bit every single day with proper scheduling and dosage.
I rotate benzos, stims, microdose psychelics, kratom and phenibut.

Best drug to read on?