Quote of the Day (Andre Gide, on the Artist and the Public)

“It was a dangerous thing for art to separate itself from life, dangerous for both art and life. When the artist no longer felt his public close to him, when art could no longer justify its existence or find its meaning and its normal use in society, in manners and morals, it did not pine away, as might have been expected—it did not die, for the laurel of Apollo is tenacious, and dies only with the race itself  that once nourished its deep roots. No, art did not die of this: it lost its head. The history of modern art is inexplicable otherwise; the artist who has lost a sense of his public is not fated to stop producing but rather to produce works with no destination."—French Nobel Literature laurate Andre Gide (1869-1951), “The Importance of the Public,” translated by Angelo P. Bertocci, in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, edited by Justin O’Brien (1959)