Although Bowles, composer, author, and inveterate traveler, is writing about the Sahara and going native to some degree in the excerpt below, his descriptive imagery applies equally to one discovering art for himself.

From Baptism of Solitude:

“You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out into the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call ‘le bapteme de la solitude.’ It is a unique sensation and has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory.

“Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaing the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for awhile is quite the same as when he came.”

—Paul Bowles

In his 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde wrote:

Now, I have said that the community by means of organization of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.

An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.

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Ars gratia artis (Latin for art for art’s sake) that banners Leo, the MGM Lion, was adopted in the 1930s as the motto of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios; credited to songwriter/publicist Howard Dietz. If you mention that your movie script is art to a major studio in Hollywood, you will be shortly shown the exit—and don’t slam the door on your way out.

“Art for art’s sake” became an oft-repeated slogan. The French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792-1867) said in a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1818, “We must have religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art for art’s sake ... the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.”

—The Columbia World of Quotations

To become an artist of might does not come without a price. To reach in and touch the eternal flame of divine fire, the artist must first purge himself of social conditioning, smugness, personality, ego—hubris, and self-deception.

The artist must strip himself bare of all veneer to reveal the self—only then will the power of creation partner and work with the artist, whom we shall now call true.

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Is art a language? Unequivocally.

As music communicates with notes and pitch that enter the ear and vibrate throughout the body, the fine artist speaks with a visual palette of shape, form, color, and feeling that enters the eye on its way to the soul. Is it music? Is it art? Who decides?

The wide scene is that it’s all art, but the picture of that view needs defining—not for comparing, but for an awareness of distinguishing one form from another.

The fine art I’m writing about is personal art, art that is alive. If you don’t know what I mean by “alive,” then you must make it your cultural goal to find out so that someday you, like the connoisseur, will understand.

Nothing is free.