Now and then a writer of prose expresses himself so finely, writes so well, that we feel instinctively and immediately not only the delight in the thought, but also a certain amount of delight in the manner of expressing the thought, in the style, ... and to the extent of the double delight such prose is art, for art, as we shall see, is by no means confined to the five so-called fine arts.
No hard and fast line can be drawn between that which is art and that which is not art, the one fades imperceptibly into the other.
And farther on in the same little volume:[41]
The current notions of art are such and the current notions of labor are such that it may seem to most of you as though any attempt to discuss the two together could result only in a waste of words; yet time was when art and labor were so intimately united in the great domain of human effort that the one almost invariably implied more or less of the other; and the time will yet be when there will be no labor without at least some art, even as there is now and ever has been no art without at least some labor.
Art lies not in the employment, but in the manner of the employment of the powers of nature for an end; not in the task, but in the attitude of the worker towards his task.
Whether a Cubist painting is or is not art does not depend upon the opinion of either critic or multitude; if it did it would be art to one man and not to another, art to one generation and not to another—an illogical conclusion.
KLEE
House by the Brook