“People tend to talk about experiment and search above all in relation to the avant-garde. But what does it mean? How can you experiment in art? Have a go and see how it turns out? But if it hasn’t worked, then there’s nothing to see except the private problem of the person who has failed. For the work of art carries within it an integral aesthetic and philosophical unity; it is an organism, living and developing according to its own laws. Can one talk of experiment in relation to the birth of a child? It is senseless and immoral.
Could it be that the people who started talking about avant-garde were those who were not capable of separating the wheat from the tares? Confused by the new aesthetic structures, lost in the face of the real discoveries and achievements, not capable of finding any criteria of their own, they included under the one head of avant-garde anything that was not familiar and easily understood—just in case, in order not to be wrong? 1 like the story of Picasso, who when asked about his ‘search’ replied wittily and pertinently (clearly irritated by the question): ‘I don’t seek, I find’”
–Andrei Tarkovskii
found in Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1987)
(via Tuirgin)
