- Henry Leutwyler
Some things are better than other things. We all know this to be true. And even though rankings are subjective, they’re still a way to organize your thoughts on things. And, personally, I prize organization. I just prize it. That, and efficiency. So when I read on Brainpickings that Virginia Woolf, at the age of 17, wrote a letter to a friend, saying that “we are a world of imitations; all the Arts that is to say imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see,” but that writing is “the least effectual method of all — & music the nearest to truth.” It made me want to rank all the arts myself, in an imitation of the young Virginia Woolf. Not because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, no, but because it is the easiest form of blogging.
opera is the highest of art forms because it combines music, visual art, dance and writing to create one supermedium
GESTAMTKUNSTWERK, HENRY
and yet it took Sontag, a writer, to express that music is the best.