“Don’t you call food⸺?”
“Not in the way you’ve been considering it. Listen. Life is art’s rival and vice versa.”
“I don’t see the opposition.”
“No, because you mix them up. You are the archenemy of any picture.”
“I? Nonsense! But art comes out of life, in any case. What is art?”
“My dear girl—life with all the nonsense taken out of it. Will that do?”
“Yes. But what is art—especially?” She insisted with her hands on a plastic answer. “Are we in life, now? What is art?”
“Life is anything that could live and die. Art is peculiar; it is anything that lives and that yet you cannot imagine as dying.”
“Why cannot art die? If you smash up a statue, it is as dead as a dead man.”
“No, it is not. That is the difference. It is the God, or soul, we say, of the man. It always has existed, if it is a true statue.”