Dawn Helene Stechschulte's Page

“You are Mr. or Ms. Everyone, since everyone is an art lover to some extent. So, you are in love. And just as you need no theory of woman to love a woman, or of man to love a man, you need no theory of art to love art. Just as no one falls in love with Woman (or Man) in general, no one falls in love with Art in general. Even Don Juan, who is looking for the woman, loves women individually, one by one. You are in love with this or that work, and certainly with more than one at a time, but not with all works. Like your choices in love affairs, your choices in art are free and at the same time compulsive. Something irresistible attracts you. You don’t always know what, but you know that you are attracted because you feel it. All you have for knowledge is your own certitude and all you have for certitude is your own feeling. To you it is indisputable; it is its own proof. Your friends, your psychoanalyst if you have one, and you yourself might be endlessly suspicious of this feeling; your social milieu might disapprove of it; the establishment might repress it or forbid its expression. All this would make it more exalted or painful, but would take nothing away from its authenticity. In love affairs, with works of art as with people, your feelings are of course determined by past experience, channeled through the story of your family, conditioned by your belonging to this or that social class, by your sex and your gender, by your education, by your heredity. Obviously, you can only love within the limits of your social determination and of the cultural opportunities that are objectively available to you, but that doesn’t stop you from loving.”