  The emphasis on the capacity of human consciousness to ‘derealise’ the world amounts to a defence of the creative freedom of the artist. The artwork is the most striking example of the power of human consciousness to turn towards the world in such a way that it takes in from it certain elements and blanks out others, in accordance to a fundamental existential project. Artistic practice is one of the most eminent demonstrations of human freedom because it shows how human practice can recreate (Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty) or recover (Marcel) a new, more ordered world out of the given world. Camus offers a concise formulation for a central principle of existentialist aesthetics: “To write is already to choose” (Camus 1951, 271).