“The artist is like a person who sits up on the rocks next to the ocean and watches the waves crash into the shore while everyone else is down in the water getting pounded by the surf. As ocean metaphors go, it’s a pretty good one. I think he meant that most of life takes place at that interface between “water” and “land”, and the survivors learn how to roll with it and turn it into a dance. But, there is always a feeling of unpredictability and lack of control when the rogue wave hits. The artist is on another plane, so to speak, where there is a distance from the struggle of ‘others’. The artist’s perspective allows for some pretty spectacular generalizations to be made about the human condition, the danger being that the detachment over time might lead to a lack of empathy or a feeling of superiority, in which case the art can only be enjoyed by other artists who are similarly detached.”
