Informant38

......he believed that art affirms and sustains life at its highest level. He became an antique dealer because he wanted to be surrounded by what the Jews call "real presences". A real presence is one where spirit and body, or spirit and object, have never been separated. It doesn't matter whether we are talking a chair, a picture, a book or a human being; what makes us feel alive is the living quality lodged there.

This quality is abundant in art. It is the reason why art is timeless. It is the reason why art does not date. We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now. Go and visit Antony Gormley's Angel of the North and you will meet the same imaginative hugeness as in Chartres or Westminster Abbey. The scale is different, the sensibility has changed, but the spirit is the same.

Mass production is about cloned objects. Art is about individual vision. Individuals can work together, as they must in theatre or opera, or where assistants work under a master, or they can work alone. However it happens, art is never a factory or a production line. Even Duchamp's Readymades were a way of forcing us to concentrate on the thing in itself as it really is.

Capitalism doesn't want you to concentrate - you might notice that much is amiss. A blurred, out-of-focus consuming is what suits the marketplace best.