Topical Guide 742
Mark Dorset
Art: The Reciprocal Relationship Between the Artist and the Work
Artist, Work, and Audience
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 47:
“Now we come to Greg himself,” she said, and added her middle finger to the tally. “As I said, you’ll get no false modesty from me, so here is my immodest claim: next to myself, Greg Tschudin is my greatest creation.”
Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat:
LXXXII
As under cover of departing Day
Slunk hunger-stricken Ramazan away,
Once more within the Potter’s house alone
I stood, surrounded by the Shapes of Clay.LXXXIII
Shapes of all Sorts and Sizes, great and small,
That stood along the floor and by the wall;
And some loquacious Vessels were; and some
Listen’d perhaps, but never talk’d at all.LXXXIV
Said one among them—“Surely not in vain
My substance of the common Earth was ta’en
And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,
Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.”LXXXV
Then said a Second—“Ne’er a peevish Boy
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy,
And He that with his hand the Vessel made
Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.”LXXXVI
After a momentary silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”LXXXVII
Whereat some one of the loquacious Lot—
I think a Sufi pipkin-waxing hot—
“All this of Pot and Potter—Tell me then,
Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”
See also:
Art, Play TG 5; Paint-by-Numbers TG 107, TG 108; Necessity of Transformation in TG 110; Doodling TG 165; Art Materials: Masonite TG 167; Art and Craft and Real Life TG 385; Art: Literature: Responding to: Sharing the Experience TG 367, TG 617; Conceptual TG 482; Commodification of TG 482
Artist, Work, and Audience TG 393; Art: Framing as an Element of TG 467
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