Veery: Who are your favorite artists and why? Daniel Dennett: My favorite visual artists I would say are Paul Klee and Henry Moore. Klee had a tremendous sense of the iconic, of the meaning that is present in symbols and near symbols, so that with a tremendous economy he can conjure up worlds; it's visual poetry. Henry Moore is my idol as a sculptor, which I one time aspired to be, and took very seriously. He's really the only sculptor that I know of in the twentieth century whose work I have never cracked: that is, most artists I think have a sort of shtick. They have a few gimmicks, they have a riff, as jazz musicians would say, that's very distinctive, and once you know the riff, you know what they do. Henry Moore's riff was too deep for me; I never could see what it was. Now, in a way, that might seem to be a confession of blindness because certainly Henry Moore's work is extremely recognizable, and there are characteristic moves that are almost cliches (the hole through the torso, and so forth, and I think that's the least successful part of his work), but he kept overcoming that and finding other visions; and he always stayed ahead of me, that's for sure, and I continued to be surprised and delighted by his work. I once met him and spent one of the happiest afternoons of my life with my wife and his wife being shown around his house and his studios in England, and it was a heavenly afternoon.
