Artist Anti-Statement

Artists should not discuss or describe their work in verbal terms. They should rebel against the current fashion of including a written statement about their work in every resume and website. The artist makes his "statement" through his work, using the vocabulary of his chosen medium -- for example: color, line and  shape for the visual artist; melody, harmony and rhythm for the musician, etc. These vocabularies, together with the ever-evolving "grammatical" rules governing their usage, constitute distinct, non-linguistic forms of communication that must be allowed to "speak" for themselves, rather than being "translated" into the more familiar language of words. In fact, application of the concepts and categories of verbal language to works that are essentially non-verbal in nature, only creates an additional barrier between the viewer (or listener) and the work. True appreciation of the visual and musical arts comes only through learning the morphology of their languages and gradually becoming more sensitive to the nuances of their vocabularies. To progress most efficiently toward this goal, we should strive to silence ordinary language when in the presence of a work of art, not reinforce it by talking or writing about the work. Ideally, even the inner chatter of our thoughts should be switched off to the extent possible, so that our attention is entirely absorbed by the sensory perceptions elicited by the work and our pre-verbal reactions to those sensations. None of this is meant to deny the value of thinking and ordinary language. But pure "looking" and pure "listening" are valuable too and can only be achieved if our habitual patterns of mental activity -- which strongly favor ordinary language and thoughts expressed in words -- are resisted.