“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The people at Prentice and generally speaking at any publishing house, live more or less at the level you saw yesterday. Each person senses an ideal, and has good intent, but those ideals and good intents are distorted by beliefs, and by the conditions accompanying them.

There are people who work in art departments as a living, gifted certainly more than most with an ability to visually portray an idea. They sense an ideal, but those ideals and abilities are everywhere distorted by millions of other considerations. What do they think of their art themselves? To what purpose do they use it? What does their wife or husband think? What does the boss think? Whose version is the final one for a cover? What does the artist think of the subject matter? What are the artist’s standards of excellence?

The artist’s standard of excellence is often the necessity of keeping his job, and he has to keep his job because he fears he is not after all a true artist, or he would be painting a great painting. And at work his art must be further distorted, it seems to him, by the ideas of salesmanship and advertising.