Connections Lost

'Art isn't about perfection. Before cameras, travelers sketched so that they could record what they saw on trips, as souvenirs, in the same way that bourgeois families, in the days before recordings, used to listen to music by making it themselves at home on the piano or singing in the parlour. There was a more intimate connection between the amateur musician or artist and the professional, because amateurs had firsthand experience. What's lost today is not just the accidental masterpiece but also that sense of art not as a remote commodity but as something we all make.

Michael Kimmelman