  2) The artist’s activity is also deeply significant in terms of its power of articulating a coherent world. Every person has to make existential choices and has a need for expression, but artists present particularly pure and powerful exemplars of these facets of human existence. Their achievements are worthy of admiration because they involve the creation of virtual worlds. Every consciousness, every being-in-the-world is expressive, but only rarely is this expression truly new. Most of the time, human expression is only the repetition of instituted meanings, as in the quasi-automatic use of spoken language. Only the great artists show the power of expression in its purity, its newness and coherence. To recreate a virtual world that can do justice to the complexity of the real world is an almost “miraculous” fact, as Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne. As we can see, the existentialists are no longer that far from the romantics in what respects their emphasis on genius.