The purpose of Art

Is there pure Art?

Culture and politics

“I do not believe, as I comfortably could have believed in some other time, that the literature of mere imaginative creation is enough to feel I have done right as a writer, since my notion of such a literature has changed and comprises on it the conflict between the individual fulfillment as it was understood by humanism, and the collective fulfillment as understood by socialism…

(…)it is no longer possible to respect, as he was respected in other times, the writer who sheltered on a misunderstood liberty of turning his back on his own human sign, on his poor and wonderful condition of man among men, of privileged one among the pauper and tormented people…

Culture and politics

(…) every intellectual, nowadays, potentially or effectively belongs to the third world for his sole vocation is a danger, a menace, a scandal for the ones who slowly but certainly hold the finger on the trigger of the bomb…

(…) a writer worthy of such a name cannot go back to his books as if nothing had happened, he cannot continue writing with the comfortable feeling that his mission is accomplished in the mere exercise of a vocation of novelist, or poet, or dramatist”.

Julio CortázarAbout the situation of the Latin-American intellectual

Saignon, 1967, May 10

Culture and politics

Schopenhauer: essentially ascetic view of the purpose of art… suppression of desire emerged from will: Vincent van Gogh in the madhouse

Sartre: committed literature… writing is a form of acting in the world; it produces effects for which the author must assume responsibility… rejection of "art for art's sake"

Bibliography

Cortázar, J. (1967, May 10). Acerca de la situación del intelectual latinoamericano. In Último Round. II. (1969). (p 278). México: Siglo XXI editors

Jean-Paul Sartre (2004, April 22). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available [online] 2007, November 12 at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#6

Drummond, J. (nd). Orlan (France). Available [online] 2007, November 12 at: http://www.digibodies.org/online/orlan.htm