Ye shook his head. "Anti-environmental. Elon is right" he said.
"The point is art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order. Once art becomes official - arti-ficial, and open to everyone, then it becomes the new slavery."
He tossed the phone down onto the table. "How can I support an idea like that? If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because it's been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it's not worth fighting for."
She reminded him that he had said a poet is of no more use to the state than a man who spends his time playing ninepins.
"Of course," Ye shouted. "And why did Plato say poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way. Of course the state has the right to chase him away from its point of view and and if he is really an artist it is in his nature to to not want to be Admitted, because if he is Admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat. Worthless.
Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. People just don't have that much vision."
“Arts and sciences serve as an anti environment that enable us to perceive the environment. In a business civilization we have long considered liberal study as providing necessary means of orientation and perception. When the arts and sciences themselves become environments under conditions of electric circuitry, conventional liberal studies, whether in the arts and sciences, will no longer serve as an anti-environment."
Through the Vanishing Point, 1968
