Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains and waters not waters. But now that I hve got to the very substance I am at rest. For it is just that I see mountains once again as mountains and waters once again as waters.

e tekhne mimeitai ten physin – This phrase is falsely rendered as “Art is an imitation of Nature.” Aristotle does not here define art; he says only, “Art imitates Natur” and means that the artistic process is like the natural process […] It is false to say that sculpture, for instance, is an art of repose if by that be meant that sculpture is unassociated with movement. Sculpture is associated with movement in as much as it is rhythmic; for a work of sculptural art must be surveyed according to its rhythm and this surveying is an imaginary movement in space. It is not false to say that sculpture is an art of repose in that a work of sculptural art cannot be presented as itself moving in space and remain a work of sculptural art.

In other words, the spiritual content of romantic art is too inward, too self-conscious, too spiritualized, too concrete – that is, already too self-consciously self-differentiating and self-negating – to be adequately represented in sensuous form. Such a content withdraws itself, inward, from the externality of artistic expression. If this is so – if romantic art in its essential determination is an art that is already always passing away and passing over into a form of expression that is no longer artistic – then what ends with the end of romantic art is, again, not so much art, as the ending of art, what dissolves is the dissolving of art – the progressive inadequation and disjunction between sensuous form and spiritual content.

But the essence of literature is precisely to evade any essential characterization, any affirmation which would stabilize or even realize it: it is never already there, it is always to be rediscovered or reinvented. It is never even certain that the words ‘literature’ or ‘art’ correspond to anything real, anything possible, or anything important.

Art that is simply a thing is an oxymoron. Yet the development of this oxymoron is nevertheless the inner direction of contemporary art. Art is motivated by a conflict: Its enchantment, a vestige of its magical phase, is constantly repudiated as unmediated sensual immediacy by the progressive disenchantment of the world, yet without its ever being possible finally to obliterate this magical element. Only in it is art’s mimetic character preserved, and its truth is the critique that, by its sheer existence, it levels at a rationality that has become absolute. Emancipated from its claim to reality, the enchantment is itself part of enlightenment: Its semblance disenchants the disenchanted world. This is the dialectical ether in which art today takes place.

Apparently [the value-based aestheticist] lacks qualifications: he does not have the authority, or the suggestive strength, or the capacity to contaminate others with his feeling. And he is overfilled with the will to rule. Thus, he tries to convince the victim that if this victim feels the same things he does, the victim will be right, he will be somehow objectively correct; and he will be wrong if he dares otherwise.

The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point — more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance — and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.

The making of a work of art is one historical process among other acts, events and structures – it is a series of actions in but also on history. It may become intelligible only within the context of given and imposed structures of meaning; but in its turn it can alter and at times disrupt these structures. A work of art may have ideology (in other words, those ideas, images, and values which are generally accepted, dominant) as its material, but it works that material; it gives it a new form and at certain moments that new form is in itself a subversion of ideology

Die Kunst ist im Vollzug. (“Art lies in its fulfilment.”)

Painting, being art, is revelation: it is revelation because it is acknowledgement; being acknowledgement, it is knowledge, of itself and of its world. Modernism did not invent this situation; it merely lives on nothing else. In reasserting that acknowledgement is the home of knowledge, it recalls what the remainder of culture is at pains to forget.