To the end

My definition of an artist is someone who gives people permission to do something that they've never done before.

I don't meant the critic's fantasy of violent innovation or breaking ground or breaking the glass ceiling but the tiny shift by degrees that comes from real lovers of the form copying and mimicking their own heroes and repetition (think: the blues) and, as a by product of that, causing the machinery of creation to skip a gear and go slightly out of control.

If the work and the creator survives, everyone else working in the field sees that they can take things a little further, and from that point onwards is faced with the choice of whether or not to develop it.

(There's another very middle-class idea that what makes art great is how much work goes into it. I tend the other way: look how much hasn't.)

Alain Resnais made Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year At Marienbad and after that, film would never be the same. Ever. Ever. Ever.