The Artist is Particularly Unfit for Life (1925)

“One great poem or sympathy or painting or sculpture or building of drama or dance composition is worth infinitely more than a true artist’s attempt to right the world”

Carl Schmitt, Self Portrait

The artist is particularly unfit for life— too sensitive. Life’s lack of unity is heartbreaking to the artist. The artist is prone to yield to temptation to attempt to reform life instead of fleeing as he should to the imaginative life (art). As a reformer he is denying his gift of the gods and lowering himself. He becomes a carpenter instead of an architect, a craftsman rather than a creator, for art is concerned with beauty first and not with the world of good and evil or usefulness and uselessness. Beauty is neither one nor the other. One great poem or sympathy or painting or sculpture or building of drama or dance composition is worth infinitely more than a true artist’s attempt to right the world. The world is for worldings — the artist, the true artist, will always be a fish out of water in the role of reform (publicist). Let him confine his attempts at living to his own private life and spend most of his time seeking the gods who have lavished their gifts upon him.