There’s something about unfinished works of art that seems to fascinate us. Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor, Tintin and Alph-Art, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible trilogy, La Sagrada Família, Sunset at Blandings—all of these tantalize us with their unrealized potential, goad us to speculate whether the finished work may perhaps have turned out to be the artist’s greatest ever. Sometimes, if you mediate long enough upon such a work, you feel you are indeed close to the artist. In your mind, you try to fill in the missing pieces, imagine what the complete work would have been like. But all the while you know that it is an exercise doomed to fail, that you will never truly know. To this ineffable mystique that surrounds unfinished works of art, you may trace a rather immodest desire that I have. Someday, I too would like to
Saturday, 18 October 2008
Unfinished Art
There’s something about unfinished works of art that seems to fascinate us. Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor, Tintin and Alph-Art, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible trilogy, La Sagrada Família, Sunset at Blandings—all of these tantalize us with their unrealized potential, goad us to speculate whether the finished work may perhaps have turned out to be the artist’s greatest ever. Sometimes, if you mediate long enough upon such a work, you feel you are indeed close to the artist. In your mind, you try to fill in the missing pieces, imagine what the complete work would have been like. But all the while you know that it is an exercise doomed to fail, that you will never truly know. To this ineffable mystique that surrounds unfinished works of art, you may trace a rather immodest desire that I have. Someday, I too would like to
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3 comments:
You have somehow managed to miss Kublai Khan. We are both writing about art. Coincidence.
Sorry to bring you back to this - if at all you do receive a notification - but one of the most awesome examples of this, although to be fair the project never even began - was the black Taj Mahal. That is one of those things, thinking of which makes me almost physically stagger backwards.
It is a troo. And I do receive notifications. :)
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