IT IS not necessary that every man should be an artist. It is necessary that every man should have his artistic faculty developed, his taste trained, his sense of beauty and insight into form and colour and that which is expressed in form and colour, made habitually active, correct and sensitive. It is necessary that those who create, whether in great things or small, whether in the unusual masterpieces of art and genius or in the small common things of use that surround a man’s daily life, should be habituated to produce and the nation habituated to expect the beautiful in preference to the ugly, the noble in preference to the vulgar, the fine in preference to the crude, the harmonious in preference to the gaudy.
The National Value of Art was first published in six installments in the weekly review Karmayogin in November and December 1909. It was first published as a book in 1922. New editions were brought out in 1936, 1946, 1953, 1970 and 1991. Sri Aurobindo made a small number of minor revisions in the editions of 1922 and 1936. The text of the present (seventh) edition is the same as the text in Early Cultural Writings, volume 1 of the complete works of Sri Aurobindo.
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