It is clear from looking at a lot of art today, that even artists underestimate art. They are content hiding in mindless doodles, trying to faintly copy Nature, or slashing out at life in blind rages of futility and desperation.



"Art is so wonderfully exhausting also because it raises the question of our entire existence every time. No artist can be a specialist. The more truly he concentrates on the work of his brushes or chisels, the more immediately the shapes and colors will confront him with the question: Who are we? Where are we? The work of art makes the world visible. No human quest for wisdom can go farther." (247)
Rudolf Arnheim



"Although our computers have opened up vast new areas of human enquiry, we still need art, for only art can forge a link between these sophisticated achievements of the human mind and nature." (248)
Udo Kultermann




"... a concern with unshaped matter is a melancholy surrender rather than the recovery of man's grip on reality. " (249)
Rudolf Arnheim



"Solitude does not mean renunciation of the world. Rather, it means placing oneself in an observatory whence it is possible to penetrate everything in the world, but filtered and clarified, not things but ideas and emotions.
Woe to the artist who denies reality. And woe to the artist who confuses reality with the real." (250)
Picasso

247. Rudolf Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art, (Berkeley and L.A., Cal., University of California Press, 1966), p. 149
248. Udo Kultermann, The New Painting, Joseph Emile Muller and Frank Elgar, A Century of Modern Painting, p. 176

249. Rudolf Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art, (Berkeley and L.A., Cal., University of California Press, 1966), p. 191
250. Domenico Porzio and Marco Valsecchi, Understanding Picasso, (N.Y., Newsweek Books, 1973), p. 90