"Life of Art" and "Art of Life"

Abstract

Life” and “Art”, or rather what is designated by these two words, interact in ways which escape the attention of those who either confine their interests to theoretically respectable statements about living phenomena on one hand or to the analysis of artistic structures on the other. Neither biology nor aesthetics therefore can be said to exhaust between themselves the scope of meaningful discourse regarding the relations between phenomena of growth and artistic symbolization. In support of this contention I now turn to reflect on two expressions in which this interaction is idiomatically named: the “life of art” and the “art of life.”