The form

Bertolt Brecht in The Struggle Against Formalism wrote: "the inability to do something, the inability to do something specific, really is a precondition for being able to do something else".

He does not glorify this unconditionally but rather tells the story of the Impressionists whose works were judged as efforts by idiots who could not paint. Painting was something specific, which required training of a specific type, not merely the application of paint on canvas. If this was not done then the person could not paint. They replied, unfortunately Brecht says, by adding insult to injury and claimed that these people who did not understand their pictures could not see. Eventually, Brecht continues, the Impressionist too had the opportunity to see the products of artists about whom they could only say they had no idea how to paint. "In the end, this game became so well-known that the most stupid philistines began to speculate in painting, only buying paintings as they did not like, because they were the ones that quite obviously had a future".

Depressing story. And seemingly true. A couple years ago I attended the wedding of a financier and was seated at a table with a number of her work colleagues. One explained how he was collecting art. I asked him what he liked, to which he replied that he was not sure but was buying many good pieces that he was told were excellent by the curator who was leading him around by the nose rather than helping him develop his own sensibility.

True, not knowing how to do something as it has been defined before, can indeed lead to doing something different and therefore interesting. But it seems to me, and I think I hear it in Brecht as well, that a complete lack of knowing does not however become a successful something, even if it does become, can not help becoming, a something else.