🗂 Art that appears effortless is best

As Mark Pilgrim used to footer, “a lot of effort went into making this effortless”:

On visiting Paestum he reflected: “In the case of everything perfect, we are accustomed to abstain from asking how it became: we rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic… We still almost feel (for example in a Greek temple such as that at Paestum) that a god must one morning have playfully constructed his dwelling out of these tremendous weights: at other times that a stone suddenly acquired by magic a soul that is now trying to speak out of it. The artist knows that his work produces its full effect when it excites a belief in an improvisation, a belief that it came into being with miraculous suddenness; and so he may assist this illusion and introduce those elements of rapturous restlessness, of blindly groping disorder, of attentive reverie that attend the beginning of creation into his art as a means of deceiving the soul of the spectator or auditor into a mood in which he believes that the complete and perfect has suddenly emerged instantaneously."

From I Am Dynamite!