"If you stick your neck out, then the sword will come. Many, many cultures have a saying like that. The English version? "The poppy that grows higher than the rest is the first one to have it's head removed by the scythe." In Japan, 'The nail that sticks up above the rest is the first to get hit by the hammer.'
This is a non-trivial observation. Artistic, creative endeavor is high risk, which the probability of return is low.
But the probability of exceptionally high return does exist, and creative endeavor, while dangerous and unlikely to be successful, is also absolutely vital to the transformation that enables us to keep our footing.
We NEED the new, merely to maintain our position. And we need to see what we have become blinded to, by our very expertise and specialization, so that we do not lose touch with the Kingdom of God and die in our boredom, ennui, arrogance, blindness to beauty and soul-deadening cynicism.
Art is exploration. Artists train people to see.
Most people with any exposure to art now regard the work of the impressionists, for example, as both self-evidently beautiful and relatively traditional. This is in no small part because we all perceive the world now, at least in part, in the manner that only the impressionists could manage in the latter half of the nineteenth century. We cannot help doing so because the impressionist aesthetic has saturated everything: advertisements, movies, popular posters, comic books, photographs - All kinds of visual arts.
Now we all see the beauty of light that only the impressionists could once apprehend.
They taught us this.
But when the impressionists first displayed their paintings - In the Salon des Refuses of 1863 (as the traditional Paris Salon had rejected them), the pieces were met with laughter and contempt. The idea of perceiving that way (paying particular attention to light, essentially rather than form) was so radical that is caused people to have emotional fits.'
Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order
