Both art forms must ultimately pose in a spurious aura of unity: the art (painting, book) presents to the audience a fully composed and complete face as it performs its cohesiveness and intelligibility (through contrast, form, content, sequence, etc), and yet the construction of the cohesions is a necessarily fragmented and long-suffering project of inspiration and revision, advance and retreat.

Training in technique can offer a ‘path through the woods’ between conception and execution, but every artist knows that a work of art (if provoked for long enough) takes on a sort of life of its own as its determinations take shape, such that development is only possible through action and re-action, and this is perhaps what you meant by the rule of two degrees? Push it two degrees further? An object of art, I believe, is not ultimately an exhibition of one’s original intentions alone, it is a product of the struggle to determine what is worth saying, and how.

Now, in the visual arts, the experience of viewing a work is ‘received’ all at once, and then (potentially) picked apart as it is observed in closer detail. The imperative to be “direct” is, I think, necessarily paramount for all but the most abstract of subjects because an image that is not ‘meaningful’ somehow in the first look will most likely will not be getting a second. I imagine that to work in advertising is to live in this imperative.

Literary art, on the other hand, must assemble meaning from a linear series of well-placed fragments, and the development of meanings must happen slowly through the unfolding of ‘significant’ events (if it isn’t significant, it shouldn’t be in the text). Therefore, the vast majority of narrative space that fills stories/novels is a simultaneous balancing act of revelation and concealment, an ever-intriguing inability to conclude (conclusion being the death of the narrative, of course). This mode of presentation (being entirely sequence oriented) fairly demands a sort of repeated re-imagining, a kind of rough finesse as each path or process of understanding is hammered out in a particular perspective, placed in a context, and brought to life.

I tend to agree with the “classic” conception of the necessity of labor in the creation of “the sensual illusion that is true painting,” and I believe that (in terms of production) it is often not simply a question of how much can be “processed” or imagined or even executed at one time, it is a question of creating an object that adequately speaks the intentions of its creator in the performance of its crafting. Crafting, it turns out, is a lot of work.