Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Art is a language, and will be a dead language if no change in it be permitted; if it is not to be a medium of expression of new ideas and new thoughts, it will lose relatively to the national life. But like the spoken language it can only change nobly, in response to an impulse from within, the irresistible demand for words, in which to communicate the new (emotions) conceptions.

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Originally published in The Wisdom of Ananda Coomaraswamy: Reflections on Indian Art, Life, and Religion, edited by S. Durai Raja Singam & Joseph A. Fitzgerald; introduction by Whitall N. Perry. World Wisdom 2011. Republished here with thanks.