The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.
The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.
Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.
... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art -- plastic, musical, poetic, balletic -- serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.
