The Best American Essays by Frazier

The Best American Essays by Frazier

In 2017, we are approximately one century past the initial conception of Quantum Theory. Yet its implications have not reached our most general, common sense understanding of the universe. Quantum Theory will change the way that we understand reality, our relationship to the environment, fellow humans and animals. It will fundamentally change the way in which we think about art.

Quantum Theory is a theory as profound as the Copernican Revolution: the revolution that told us that Earth is not the stationary center of the universe. What a shock Today we have a new shock. The Quantum Revolution is here.

Quantum Art explores the artist's relationship to art, in the midst of the paradigm shift between a Newtonian and Quantum World View. Quantum Art suggests an opening, in which art can become itself. Quantum Art suggests that mimesis is a creative, becoming activity. Mimesis is not a performance in which we copy the known, singular world. It is an activity of observing the uncertain and creating the uncertain. The world itself, a quantum world, is uncertain, potential and infinite. The Quantum Artist plays with her desire to create her world through observation.

Robert Atwan is director of The Blue Hills Writing Institute at Curry College and the series editor of the annual Best American Essays, which he founded in 1985. His essays, reviews, and critical articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, River Teeth, and many other publications. For Bedford/St. Martin s, he has also edited Ten on Ten: Major Essayists on Recurring Themes (1992); Our Times (1998); and Convergences (2009). He has coedited (with Jon Roberts) Left, Right, and Center: Voices from Across the Political Spectrum (1996), and is coeditor with Donald McQuade of The Writer s Presence (2009).