It has been said that art speaks for itself, but is it allowed to?

If only one can keep still in one set of circumstances it is nearly always possible to find some way of accommodating oneself to them. It is this impulsive restless movement that makes any sort of solution impossible. Like a plant which is continually transplanted, one slowly dries up.
Humanity has struck its tents and returned to its nomadic origins. But this time the motive power is fear from behind rather than hope before. And we are overburdened with baggage. The acquired and inherited habits, the memories that seem more and more precious the further they recede into the past. The objects, possessions, and people in which, when we have to part from them, we realize suddenly we have deposited an essential part of ourselves.

Keith Vaughan -- 3 July 1943

Keith Vaughan -- Broken Harbour at Port Allan 1955

'Variation 15,' writes a critic, reviewing a piano recital, 'demanded an immediate round of applause.' Really? - I would have thought that Variation 15 and all the other variations demanded to be listened to, not clapped at. Nothing to me is more senseless and distressing than the hideous noise of hundreds of moist palms being banged together which immediately follows, and is often superimposed on, the closing bars of great music. It is inconceivable to me why people should feel an urge to do this. The only possible follow on to great music is silence. Anything else is an anticlimax and shatters the effect. It is painful enough anyway to have to climb down again to 'reality' without being slapped down by hundreds of little hands all round you. But it doesn't seem that many people share this view. (Clapping is, however, quite useful after a bad performance to help to clean the sounds out of one's ears.) It exemplifies, of course, the role which art is required to play in society now - to stimulate comment. It is the same with painting. It has been said that art speaks for itself, but is it allowed to? Never. A host of middle-men rush in between explaining, interpreting, commenting, unscrewing and feeding the thing to the viewer bit by bit. Even the artist himself is expected to join in. Nobody should be allowed to have any work of art explained to them, whether music, painting or literature, until they have first of all learnt it by heart. By then it would probably be unnecessary.

Keith Vaughan -- 12 March 1962