“People can behave like savages when they are allowed to, but only in art do they go so far as to call themselves primitivists. And when the primitivist urge doesn’t seize them, the psychoaesthetic urge, the study of human evil - itself another form of primitivism, when you come to think about it - does. So portrait painting is a further recidivism that’s frowned on and discouraged - that’s insofar as one can discourage anything in a free society. In the main, prize-culture does the job for us. When all the gongs go to landscape, why would any aspiring artist waste his energies on the dull and relentless cruelties of the human face?”
Book:J
