Art is a new connection of ideas..

An idea is any imagined event. Ideas are the artist’s material.

An idea can be trivial or complex. “Let’s go to the park” is an idea. This event has been imagined and has happened many times. “Maybe the earth goes around the sun in an elliptical orbit” is a more complex and challenging idea. As Blake said, “What is now proved was once, only imagind.”

The function of any idea is to make the future.

But the function of art is to change the future.

An idea can be an event not previously imagined.

Art is a previously unimagined connection between ideas. It is an idea that hasn’t happened

Art is not therefore a new thing. It exists, but has never been expressed. It’s what you were thinking but had never thought to say.

Ironically, scientists understand art better than anyone. At least they have a name for the way it is imagined. They call this ‘generalisable reasoning’.

Generalisable reasoning is the ability to see many different possibilities at the same time.

Computer scientists understand it because it is the one thing computers can’t do.

Brains are very good at it. This is because if animals couldn’t do it they would die.

Artists use the capacity brains have for generalisable reasoning to imagine connections between things that haven’t previously occurred and hadn’t been previously imagined.

Art reasons in a way that predicts your thought, because it connects thoughts that already exist.

Consequently, art is an event that has never previously happened.

Art happens as it is imagined. It is a story.

Art is the only means we have of understanding the future.

Art happens in front of you because it requires your attention.

It has commercial value, but it is only created if it is free.

Art does not have a specific time. It makes no sense to say that the art came before, during or after the event or the imagination of it, because it is the imagination of the event.

Art brings artist, art and observer into the same moment in time by stepping outside the sequence of things that we imagine as time.

Consequently, art is unforeseen but not prescient.

Because art reveals what was never previously seen it is sometimes thought to offer glimpses of omniscience. However, once drawn into the process of observation, the illusion vanishes.

This is why Blake said that eternity is in love with the productions of time.