Quote from Jeanette Winterson’s book on aesthetics, Art Objects:

“Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art… is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar… We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.”

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See this link on brain pickings:

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/27/jeanette-winterson-art-objects/