I stopped reading after the image of the polar bear. I skimmed, but a phrase caught my eye after or was it before the bear? Something about art and "what is possible." I can't remember if the verb that linked the two was "be" or "open." The theory of catharsis has to do with the mimetic potentiality of art, how the representation of an emotion, for example, can communicate itself to the viewer mimetically. I need to mime your sorrowful face before I can start to feel your sorrow, to feel for your sorrow. (Which is coincidentally why people who have undergone a lot of neurotic protein skin treatments loss their capacity for empathy: because their faces won't automatically imitate the expressions of their interlocutors; if you smile at them they won't smile back immediately, as you know you or I would). For the Guarani of South America, culture is synonymous with finery or ornamentation. Culture is the finery that humans wear, that separates them from other animals. Like any sign of distinction, its first function is doubtless one of recognition. Mimicry, potentiality, recognizability. These words frame the space within which we can start to think about the question you raised. Though I cannot speak for Stephen, I am not sure that I would agree with what I think he's saying, though I would agree with the following phrase by a man named Robert: "Art is what makes life more interesting than art." You may have already read or seen it somewhere. Or with this poem by another Robert, on a statement by a man called r for Reinhardt:
i'm beginning to think
r was wrong
not r, but an idea i had
of him that I practically
worshipped
that said life was the
opposite of art
& art was the opposite of life
of life
& proud of it
but i think life
has something
to do with art
& it's just a matter
of finding
the special point
at which the
two of them
get together
End of quote and let's see if I can bring these things together somehow, make them work with or against each other. Below is a woman whose eyes are a butterfly and whose hair is leaves. The importance that we attach to words like art or even life cannot be measured lightly, massively. It should be gauged, both individually and generally, not solely in terms of what we say nor even what we do in the realm of art, for example, since we are talking about art, but also of life, of everyday life, in its most banal iterations. The special point that Robert Lax evokes is as vast as a surface and yet as dimensionless as a point. It is at that specific and singular point, however, in that repetition of singularities, that both the words "life" and "art" as well as the meanings that we ascribe to them are illuminated.
