The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
811.
(3) _The compulsion to imitate:_ extreme irritability, by means of which a certain example becomes contagious--a condition is guessed and represented merely by means of a few signs.... A complete picture is visualised by one's inner consciousness, and its effect soon shows itself in the movement of the limbs,--in a certain suspension of the _will_ (Schopenhauer!!!!). A sort of blindness and deafness towards the external world,--the realm of admitted stimuli is sharply defined. This differentiates the artist from the layman (from the spectator of art): the latter reaches the height of his excitement in the mere act of apprehending: the former in giving--and in such a way that the antagonism between these two gifts is not only natural but even desirable. Each of these states has an opposite standpoint--to demand of the artist that he should have the point of view of the spectator (of the critic) is equivalent to asking him to impoverish his creative power.... In this respect the same difference holds good as that which exists between the sexes: one should not ask the artist who gives to become a woman--to _"receive."_ Our æsthetics have hitherto been women's æsthetics, inasmuch as they have only formulated the experiences of what is beautiful, from the point of view of the receivers in art. In the whole of philosophy hitherto the artist has been lacking ... _i.e._ as we have already suggested, a necessary fault: for the artist who would begin to understand himself would therewith begin to mistake himself--he must not look backwards, he must not look at all; he must give.--It is an honour for an artist to have no critical faculty; if he can criticise he is mediocre, he is modern.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.