Saturday, June 04, 2005

Left-handed art: Walter Benjamin

These days one cannot cling to his own specialty. Improvisation is always the high card. The crucial moves will always be made with the left hand.
- quoted from memory, my translation of a Portuguese translation of Walter Benjamin.

I'm not really sure if it was meant to be a critique or just a statement of a fact, but it made me think. Aren't the "post-avant-gardes" based on the principle of innovation? Isn't the idea of having to be new and different exactly the "left-handed trick" attitude?
So what we might be living is an art world of right-handed painters, sculptors, poets, writers, theater directors, that all create works with their left hand, because "that's the trick"?
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