In this blog I’ll start by thinking out loud about my work in progress, The Sasquatch Book of Art Quotes. The following quote, also from Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art should be enough to get us started:
“As a first step we must realize that we are inclined to take an astonishing phenomenon too much for granted...countless millions read books, listen to music, watch the theatre, go to the cinema. Why? To say that they seek distraction, relaxation, entertainment, is to beg the question. Why is it distracting, relaxing, entertaining to sink oneself in someone else’s life and problems, to identify oneself with a painting or a piece of music or with the characters in a novel, play, or film? Why do we respond to such ‘unreality’ as though it were reality intensified? What strange, mysterious entertainment is this? And if one answers that we want to escape from an unsatisfactory existence into a richer one, into experience without risk, then the next question arises: why is our own existence not enough? Why this desire to fulfill our unfulfilled lives through other figures, other forms, to gaze from the darkness of an auditorium to a lighted stage where something that is only play can so utterly absorb us?”
