The medium is always a
medium, not merely a material; and if it becomes merely a material to be
manipulated, it ceases to be a medium.
Now professionalism is the result of a false analogy between mechanical
invention and the higher activities. It happens whenever the medium is
regarded merely as material to be manipulated, when the artist thinks
that he can learn to fly by mastering some other artist's machine, when
his art is to him a matter of invention gradually perfected and
necessarily progressing through the advance of knowledge and skill. One
often finds this false analogy in books about the history of the arts,
especially of painting and music. It is assumed, for instance, that
Italian painting progressed mechanically from Giotto to Titian, that
Titian had a greater power of expression than Giotto because he had
command of a number of inventions in anatomy and perspective and the
like that were unknown to Giotto. So we have histories of the
development of the symphony, in which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven are
treated as if they were mechanical inventors each profiting by the
discoveries of his predecessors. Beethoven was the greatest of the three
because he had the luck to be born last, and Beethoven's earliest
symphonies are necessarily better than Mozart's latest because they were
composed later. But in such histories there always comes a point at
which artists cease to profit by the inventions of their predecessors.
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