THE INVENTED PART (RODRIGO FRESÁN), JOHN UPDIKE AND ART AS REFUTATION OF THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

The day Updike died, he reread something the writer said in an interview and that he’d always found really moving: “My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”

One good thing about this definition is that it is correct regardless of the quality of the art. A bad novel, a bad song, a bad movie...they also bring something to the world, they bring order. From my point of view, this is more of a refutation of the second law of Thermodynamics, than of the conservation of matter. A sculptor, for instance, just redistributes the preexisting matter, like David is said to have been taken out from a piece of marble by Michelangelo

Only Embryo Growth and the birth of a new living being are similar to the artistic creation, that is why we say things like “the artist has given birth to a masterpiece”