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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 1 (April 2, 1934.)

The Ana-niceties of Art

The Ana-niceties of Art.

For Art is the fastidious fashioning of fact or fancy into something which solaces the soul and enchants eye or ear. Art enters into everything from loving to living. For instance, whilst many people are mere low liars, Ananias was an artist in fastidious fallacy, and Baron Munchausen was a master of mis-statement. In their hands, lies were lifted into the limbo of literature and the verities were mere material for forging their fictions. But, to the artist, all is Art, whether the material at hand is dough or dreams, pastry or platinum. Even a sausage, shaped with the subtle something which snatches the super-sausage from mystery to mysticism, is a work of art and a skin of beauty. An inartistic sausage is an omen of evil, a fiction of force-meat, a caricature of captured conjecture, a sarcophagus of sacrificed succulence and a butcher's blunder. But a sausage which reflects the soul of its sculptor is one which scintillates, one which is blandly blended, one in which artifice is concealed in art, and inspiration and mastication are equally equated.

It is safe to say that, had Michael Angelo turned his talent from the mysteries of form to the form of “mysteries,” he would have sculped the super-sausage—as pink as a cradled cray, stream-lined from coupling to cap, as dainty as a dolphin, as silky as a seraphine, groomed, bloomed, shining and shapely—in short, a sausage moulded by a master.