A New Kind Of Creative Poverty

I keep returning to a line from Simon Schama’s “The Power of Art.” It is the book’s first sentence: “great art has dreadful manners.” Schama, a historian at Columbia University, tells us that art is a “thug,” “merciless and wily.” It will “grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality.”