"Thoughts on the concept of artist in AK Coomaraswamy"
This fragment is entirely quoted from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's book, The Transformation of Nature into Art, in the chapter dedicated to Meister Eckhart, a marvel of analysis.
"In external operation, these powers of the soul, intellect and will, correspond to the vocation, as in the artist (craftsman), teacher (doctor), or celebrant (priest), and to conduct as distinct from specific skill.
The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist. Vocations ("to command this or that," M. Eckhart, Sermons 16) are so many different disciplines; conduct ("to comfort another," Sermons 16) is another discipline proper to all men alike. All activity involves what we would now call an aesthetic process, a succession of problem, solution, and execution. Materials aside, whoever acts, acts in the same way, for the will follows the intellect, whether he builds a house, studies mathematics, holds a celebration, or does good works.
Our modern system of thought has replaced this spiritual division of labor with a caste system that divides men into species. Those who have lost most from this, professionally, are artists on the one hand, and laymen in general on the other.
The artist (meaning the one who is still called that) loses because of his isolation and the corresponding pride and the castration of his art, conceived no longer as intellectual, but only as emotional in motivation and meaning; the worker (who is now denied the name of artist) loses because he is not called upon, but forced to work unintelligently, since commodities are valued above men.
Everyone has lost equally, since art is now a luxury and no longer the normal type of activity, and all men are forced to live in filth and disorder, and have become so accustomed to this that they do not even notice it.
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