Art as experience

For art to be experienced or observed, it has to be emplaced — put in place, however temporarily. There are often two contradictory demands under which artists labor: "To be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self." According to Seamus Heaney, the two ways in which a place is known — one is the lived and illiterate; the other, learned and literate — co-exist "in a conscious and unconscious tension" in the artistic sensibility. In many ways, existence, space, and history, demonstrates just how strongly art, personal life, and the world interlock.