Anarchy 51/Art and Social Responsibility
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140
“Whereas urban societies produce barbaric substitutes for art, the rejects of such societies, because they approach the community-pattern, are still able to create work which has a human significance. The primitives have seceded or been ejected from the structure of society and its relative security, into ghettoes, barracks, huts, casual wards, and there they have set up a way of life of their own, subject to risks and constraints which make them the indisputable victims of their environment, and the constraint is one which a sympathetic intellectual can only share if he shares the circumstances which created it. The Blues or the cante hondo are the product of the contact between this grindstone of adversity and a tradition which is either there already or ready to hand in a few months: the tradition of the Blues came into existence in a matter of years, its form dictated by the circumstances under which it was sung, and its musical pattern by the availability of instruments …”
alex comfort: Art and Social Responsibility 1946.
