First, it must be the indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable. From an interview with Walter Pach in Scribner's Magazine , May, 1912. You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The Critic as Artist , part II, 1891.
Art is the most intense mode of invidualism that the world has known.
Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. And many centuries after their core, whether we call it Rembrandt or Vermeer, is extinguished, they continue to send us their special rays. The Maxims of Marcel Proust , translated by Justin O'Brien, published 1948.