[…] in art, which has developed out of the collective consolation-ideology of religion and at whose further limit we find the Romantic artist striving after the complete love-experience, the individuality-conflict is solved in that the ego, seeking at once isolation and union, creates, as it were, a private religion for itself, which not only expresses the collective spirit of the epoch, but produces a new ideology – the artistic – which for the bulk of them takes the place of religion. […] this happens only at the summit of individual “artist’s art,” where there is deification of the genius-concept and an adoration of works of art which is comparable only to the worship of statues of gods, though they already represent mere men. Before this, art is still – particularly in its Classical period – an individual working-out of the forces of which religions are made. These forces then become concentrated in the single creative individual, whereas before they animated a whole community.
Otto Rank. Art and Artist.