The normal method of organization, in minds of this kind, is a method which tends to deny the substance of feelings, to dismiss them as ‘subjective’ and therefore likely to obscure or hinder the ordinary march of thought. If the mind is a ‘machine for thinking’, then feeling, in the ordinary sense, is irrelevant to its operations. Yet the ‘machine for thinking’ inhabits a whole personality, which is subject, as in [John Stuart] Mill’s case, to complex stresses, and even to breakdown. Observing this situation, a mind organized in such a way conceives the need for an additional ‘department’, a special reserve area in which feeling can be tended and organized. It supposes, immediately, that such a ‘department’ exists in poetry and art, and it considers that recourse to this reserve area is in fact an ‘enlargement’ of the mind. Such a disposition has become characteristic, and both the practice and the appreciation of art have suffered from art being thus treated as a saving clause in a bad treaty.

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (via frankfurtschooldropout)

So art is humanity’s tailings pond. And such pretty colors!