Creative and Professional Practice (Visual Arts)

Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.

Perhaps all professions ... are filled with hostility toward the individual, saturated with hatred by those who find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid duty.

The professional man lives off ideas, not for them. ... He has acquired a stock of mental skills that are for sale. The skills are highly developed, but we do not think of him as being an intellectual if certain qualities are missing from his work—disinterested intelligence, generalizing power, free speculation, fresh observation, creative novelty, radical criticism. At home he may happen to be an intellectual, but at his job he is a hired mental technician who uses his mind for the pursuit of externally determined ends. It is this element—the fact that ends are set from some interest or vantage point outside the intellectual process itself—which characterizes both the zealot, who lives obsessively for a single idea, and the mental technician, whose mind is used not for free speculation but for a salable end.