Words Worth Noting - July 3, 2024

“We do not see in the past a perpetual line of increasing liberation or enlargement of artistic experiment. What we see in the past is the much more human business of men first doing something badly; then doing it well; then doing it too well – or, at least, too easily and too often. Then they commonly begin to do something else; but the thing is much more often an old thing than a new thing.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Novelty in Art” in Illustrated London News October 6, 1928, reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023) [critiquing “the rather antiquated theory of progress”.]