Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Language
Artists are often mythologized for their neuroses—picture James Joyce scrambling to the printer with corrected pages of Ulysses or Orson Welles toiling over his unfinished feature length of Don Quixote. Following the release of his seventh studio album, The Life of Pablo, Kanye West continued tweaking the supposedly finished product for several weeks. Track titles and lyrics changed. New guests appeared throughout the album and some songs were divided into new tracks entirely. West tweeted that was a work of “living breathing changing creative expression,” giving critics ample room to ponder the plastic nature of art and the definition of completion. became more than a well-received addition to West’s eclectic discography—it also became an experiment on the revision process itself.
