When you boil it all down, that is the social purpose of art: the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning".
What was once a pointedly outsider and marginal activity — performance art, the creation of time-based work that defied definition and continuing exhibition — has become the everyday stuff of major museums.
The ideal of the art of bonsai is to create, through dwarfing & shaping, a miniature of a venerable tree on a horizon with the perfection of line of a work of art; the creation of a fine bonsai can be a lifework; many living bonsai are over a century old; bonsai are as precious as jewels.
It has been a worthy project to spend an entire life putting out a strong offense as the best defense -- that is to say, in works of art, the creation of an enormous identity through the serial publishing of the diaries.
Noting that, before that era, it was unusual for art to be commissioned solely on the strength of an artist's name, the authors credit Vasari with "the invention of art" — the creation of a world in which ascribing a painting to Leonardo, for example, may transform our perception of its worth.
