Polish poet Adam Zagajewski writes in Another Beauty: “The greatest artists of our age… acted as if they wanted to annihilate the forms of art they practiced. Picasso worked to destroy art, Stravinsky went after music, while Joyce’s target was the novel.” Perhaps this sense of annihilation of a form was necessary to create something original in that form. They felt they must destroy the stale approaches that preceded them before they could begin anew.
Zagajewski also writes, in the same volume: “Art springs from the most profound admiration for the world.” The word ‘admiration’ has a fascinating etymology. Its family of words includes miracle, mirage, mirror, marvelous and smile. The Indo-European root for all these words is mei, ‘I smile’, and they also find their root in the Latin mirus, ‘astonishing, strange, wonderful’. ‘Admiration’ comes, more specifically, from the Latin admirari, ‘to wonder at’. Art, of course, is grounded in and springs from this sense of wonder. A sense of wonder does not necessarily suggest the ‘extraordinary’; one can have a sense of wonder about the most ‘ordinary’ things: the waxy light reflected from a green pepper, the way the fellow at the corner gas station is always smiling and calls me ‘boss’, the pale blue winter sky between the clouds.