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The Law of the Arts

"For this seems, finally, to be the law of all the arts - one essential prerequisite to the production of a great work of art is a great man. You cannot have the art without the man, and when you have the man you have the art. His time and his surroundings will color him; his art will not be at one time or place precisely what it might be at another; but in the end, the art is the man and at all times and in all countries is just as great as the man.

Let us clear our minds, then, of the illusion that there is in any important sense such a thing as progress in the fine arts. We may with a clear conscience judge every new work for what it appears in itself to be, asking of it that it be noble and beautiful and reasonable, not that it be novel or progressive. If it be great art it will always be novel enough, for there will be a great mind behind it, and no two great minds are alike. And if it be novel without being great, how shall we be the better off? There are enough forms of mediocre or evil art in the world already. Being no longer intimidated by the fetish of progress, when a thing calling itself a work of art seems to us hideous and degraded, indecent and insane, we shall have the courage to say so and shall not care to investigate it further."

Kenyon Cox
The American Academy of Arts and Letters
December 13, 1912

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Daniel Leo Simpson


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Other Websites of Interest:

 CMA The Classical Archives, LLC.

The Classical Archives LLC, the largest archive of its kind on the web, offer thousands of classical music files in MIDI and Mp3 format you can listen to at the click of your mouse. Most composers are represented. A major award-winning cultural site which provides its own indexes and search engines by keywords or composer.

(Daniel Leo Simpson has his own page of his compositions in MIDI and MP3 file format at the Classical Archives. Click HERE to open a new browser window to that page now.)