Reality has only one purpose in art

“Reality has only one purpose in art: the artist must become familiar with it so as to know how to avoid it. He should learn from it so as to know how to distance himself from it. To say that art should represent the world as it really is would be to assert that the purpose of art is to imitate those things that do not interest us even in reality. Realism has asserted as much, but in so doing it has merely concealed its artistic impotence. By proclaiming that art has no other purpose than to portray what exists, it hides its inability to accomplish anything beyond that reality...Fiction is eternal; reality perishes. Invented forms live; real ones vanish.”

— Jiri Krasek Ze Lvovic, Gothic Soul