N really P but on the historic sources of the authority of a vision. Link after quote.

[Mark Kohut]

onn Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 9:49 AM, Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com> wrote:
To point to the Real or Not Real is not the question.
> 
>I will always be disgreeing with this. 
>As Josipovici sez below: "if every choice is merely the
>artist's, why is one choice better than any other?" 
> 
>Shall I project a world is the phrase, not Shall I project my projections?
> 
>Josipovici's new book [link at end] excoriates lame English writers, some of 
>whom---McEwan
>this list has scored.....context here for why, if interested. 
> 
>From the book:
> 
>
>Thomas Mann understood all this; his wonderful novel Doctor Faustus is an 
>exploration of the paradoxes and depths of the modernist crisis, which, as the 
>title suggests, he locates firmly in the 16th century. Taking our cue from this, 
>
>we could say that, for Homer, the Muses dictated both the content and the form 
>of what he had to say; for medieval artists such as the sculptors of the great 
>cathedrals, what was to be depicted was determined by the cathedral's clerics, 
>and the forms - the way the beard of Moses or the hand of Christ were to be 
>carved - was given by tradition. This gives medieval art, as both Pound and 
>Proust recognised, an innocence and freedom from ego that both writers felt went 
>
>missing from European art in the ensuing centuries.
>
>By the 16th century, the consensus on which this was based had disappeared. 
>Though patrons went on giving specific commissions to artists and composers for 

>the next two centuries, artists were becoming increasingly conscious that, from 

>now on, they had to rely only on their imagination. Our culture, which is still 

>in thrall to the individualistic strain in the Renaissance and in Romanticism, 
>welcomed this as a splendid new freedom. More prescient souls, however, sensed 
>what Duchamp would eventually articulate so icily - if every choice is merely 
>the artist's, why is one choice better than any other?
 

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/09/writers-english-modernism