Art is what it is (Berry)
July 23rd, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Beauty, Poetry, Quotes
You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117