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When We Accuse Art of Being Pretentious, We're Just Afraid We Don't Get It
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Brian Eno: "If you watch children, they play all the time -- but what are they doing when they're playing? They're imagining. They're feeling out things. They're trying to understand what other people feel about things. So children learn by playing adults play through art."
From an interview with David Whyte:
"And one of the healing things about the natural world to human beings is that it’s just itself. But we, as human beings, are really quite extraordinary in that we can actually refuse to be ourselves. We can get afraid of the way we are. And we can temporarily put a mask over our face and pretend to be somebody else or something else. And the interesting thing is then we can take it another step of virtuosity and forget that we were pretending to be someone else and become the person we were, on the surface, at least, who we were just pretending to be in the first place."
"We need pretentiousness. Not the fake accusations of pretentiousness that merely seek to divide us and undermine human advancement – but the real pretentiousness that can advance creative and intellectual endeavour by allowing a good idea for a magazine article to be extended into a book." Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox - digested read
