Paradox is the name of the game where acting as an art is concerned; it is a rare hard-headed politician who is at home with any of the arts these days; most often the artist is somehow suspect, a nuisance, a threat to morality, or a fraud. At the same time the second most lucrative American export after airplanes is art -- namely music and films. But art has always been the revenge of the human spirit upon the short-sighted. Consider the sublime achievements of Greece and her military victories and defeats, the necrophilic grandeur of the Egyptians, the Romans' glory, the awesome Assyrian power, the rise and fall of the Jews and their incomprehensible survival -- and what do we have left of it all but a handful of plays, essays, carved stones, and some strokes of paint on paper or the rock cave wall -- in a word, art? The ironies abound. Artists are not particularly famous for their steady habits, the acceptability of their opinions, or their conformity with majority mores, but whatever is not turned into art disappears forever. It is very strange when you think about it, except for one thing that is not strange but quite logical -- however dull or morally delinquent an artist may be, in his moment of creation when his work pierces to the truth, he cannot dissimulate, he cannot fake it. Tolstoy once remarked that what we look for in the work of art is the revelation of the artist's soul, a glimpse of god. You can't act that.

Arthur Miller © 2001.
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