SCHOLAR ISLAND
ARTS
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult."
-Hippocrates (450-400 B.C.
"The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress."
-Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Arts
"Science and technology follow a steady path of progress and improvement. The arts do not."
-Alexander Green
"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the
reality
of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race."
James Joyce
"Democratic principles don't apply to art."
-Richard Serra
"A long while after painting Camille on her deathbed, Monet confessed to his friend Georges Clemenceau about the pain or shock he felt when he suddenly realized, while painting it, that he was studying her pallid face and noting the tiny variations of tone and color brought about by death, as if they were an observable everyday matter! He ended by saying: "Ainsi de la bete qui tourne sa meule. Plaignez-moi, mon ami." (Like the beast who turns his millstone. Pity me, my friend.)"
article: "The Enveloping Air: Light and moment in Monet" by John Berger Harpers Magazine Jan 2011
"A museum is a cathedral of contemplation, a place to discover riches of imagination and insight. "Art teaches nothing," said Henry Miller, "except the significance of life." Proust said, "Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal."
Art surprises you, makes you see things in new ways. A particular work can stretch your perceptions and expand your mental capacities. It can purge emotions, clear your mind, edify and enlarge the soul."
-Alexander Green
Beyond Wealth
"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The artist never entirely knows. We take leap after leap into the dark."
-Agnes De Mille
"A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal."
-C.G. Jung
"For me insanity is super-sanity. The normal is psychotic-a collective psychosis. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity."
-Jean Dubuffet
"All art is based on non-conformity."
-Ben Shahn
"Art is a quest for the useless."
-Paul Flemin
"All Art is Propaganda."
-George Orwell
"Art is the revelation of man; and not merely that, but likewise the revelation of nature, speaking through man."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Art is the communication of ecstasy."
-Peter Ouspensky
"Concern with morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid."
Paul Flemin
"Art is part of a rebellion against the realities of its unfilled desire."
-Emma Goldman
"The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life....It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make h is own."
-W. Somerset Maugham
"I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow. I think that of all countries-we have to over-look the communist countries of course-America is the most mechanized, robotized, of all."
-Arthur Miller
"I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization that full recognition of the place of the artist. if art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
"Being an artist means belonging to a unique gang of outlaws."
-Robert Venosa
"I am obedient. Just about anybody can be a rebel; it is a much more difficult undertaking to obey silently the dictates of one's soul and to spend one's life looking for the truest means to express one's temperament and talents,"
-Georges Rouault
"There is only one valuable thing in art:- the thing you cannot explain."
-Georges Braque
"We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?"
-Aldous Huxley
"All art is magic."
Pablo Picasso
"All art is a struggle to be in a particular sort of way, to be "virtuous."
-Iris Murdoch
"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."
-John Updike
"The end of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines."
-Aristotle
"All art is the result of the deliberate transformed by the accidental; the poet wields his words and the composer his notes obsessively, and then something happens-a chance encounter with a stranger, a snatch of overheard conversation, a dream of a long-dead friend-and the work spins off into a totally new plane. The original poem or symphony or painting or screenplay explodes and reassembles itself, taking on immortal life the way a hero does when he's wounded by the monster and heals and returns to the world a monster himself.
And 'monster' is not a hastily chosen word; the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser says all art has a fundamental asymmetry, that there are always gaps that only the reader can fill in. That's the problem with art that is wholly deliberate, like bad pop songs and formula movies; there's been no accident, nothing to rough up that innocuous perfection. back in the 18th century, Edmund burke divided all art into the beautiful and the sublime, with the beautiful being smooth and pleasing, the sublime horrific and fascinating. We like the cute little girl in the Frankenstein movie, but it's the monster that we fear and dream of when we're at home in the dark and we think we hear a footstep in the other room."
-David Kirby Little Richard: The birth of Rock'n'Roll
"It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, excepis exicipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work."
-Samuel Butler
"Art is either a revolutionist or a plagiarist."
-Paul Gauguin
"ART, NIETZSCHE ASSERTS BOLDLY IN The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) "owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysiac duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflict and periodic acts of reconciliation."
"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes, if he is a painter? ....No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war."
-Pablo Picasso
Picasso's War by Russell Martin
"Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life."
-Henry Miller
"A work of art has no importance whatever to society...it is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me."
-Vladimir Nabokov
"A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is very important. When power feels itself totally justified and approved it immediately destroys whatever freedom we have left; and that is Fascism."
-Luis Bunuel Quoted by Carlos Fuentes, New York Times Magazine March 11,1973
"Only art and science give us intimations and hopes of a higher life."
-Ludwig van Beethoven
"What attracted me was less art itself than the artist's life and all that it meant for me: the idea of creativity and freedom of expression and action. I had been attracted to painting and drawing for a long time, but it was not an irresistible passion; what I wanted, at all costs, was to escape the monotony of life."
-Pierre Bonnard
"Whether in music or architecture, literature, painting, or sculpture, art opens our eyes, ears, and feelings to something beyond ourselves, something we cannot experience without the artist's vision and the genius of his craft. The placing of Greek temples, like the Temple of Poseidon on the promontory at Sunion, outlined against the piercing blue of the Aegean Sea, Poseidon's home; the majesty of Michelangelo's sculptured figures in stone; Shakespeare's command of language and knowledge of of the human soul; the intricate order of Bach, the enchantment of Mozart; the purity of Chinese monochrome pottery with its lovely names; celadon, oxblood, peach blossom, Clair de lune; the exuberance of Tiepolo's ceilings where, without picture frames to limit movements, a whole world in exquisitely beautiful colors lives and moves in the sky; the prose and poetry of all the writers from Homer to Cervantes to Jane Austen and John Keats to Dostoevsky and Chekhov-who made all these things? WE- our species-did....The random samples I have mentioned, and all the rest they suggest, are sufficient reason to honor mankind."
-Barbara W. Tuchman Mankind's Better Moments," Autumn 1980
"Someday or other I believe I shall find a way of having an exhibition of my own in a cafe."
-Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo in Paris
"Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art."
-Tom Stoppard
"Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words....By means of art we are sometimes sent-dimly briefly-revelations unattainable by reason."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"The work of the artist .the only thing he's good for is to
take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things and put
them together in a frame, to give them some kind of shape and
meaning. Even if it's only his view of meaning. "
Katherine Anne Porter
"'Anyone who presumes to teach art has no understanding of it. "
Eleonora Duce
"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
-William Faulkner
"One does not fall into the abyss. It is not a chasm. You simply are in the abyss. A tiny line separates our comfortable world from the abyss. One can cross this line but a return is less likely. One of the names for this abyss is art."
-Mikhailo Vasilievich Lomonov
"It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout."
Ben Shahn
"I cannot teach my art nor the art of any school, since I deny that art can be taught or, in other words, I claim that art is entirely individual and is for each artist only the talent resulting from his own inspiration and his own study of tradition. To this I add that in my opinion art or talent in an artist can be no more than a means of applying his own personal abilities to the ideas and objects of the period in which he lives."
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks."
-Emil Nolde
"I am an artist....I am here to live out loud."
-Emile Zola
"We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way."
-David Hockney
"There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain that a failed artist."
-Erica Jong
Fear of Flying
"We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell."
-Pablo Picasso
"Artist" refers to a person willfully enmeshed in the dilemma
of categories, who performs as if none of them existed.. .The
contemporary artist is not out to supplant recent modern art
with a better kind; 'he wonders what art might be. '
Allan Kaprow
O.K. (1966)
"The task of art is enormous. Through the influence of real art
aided by science guided by religion, that peaceful cooperation
of man which is now obtained by external means-by our law-courts,
police, charitable institutions, factory inspection, etc.-should
be obtained by man's free and joyous activity. Art should cause
violence to be set aside."
Leo Tolstoy
"It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is..."
Pablo Picasso
"To describe the fatal character of contemporary things the painter uses that most modern recourse-surprise."
-Guillaume Apollinaire
"All art is creation in satisfying violation of expectation."
-Josh Carter
"One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself...I can't live where I want to-I can't go where I want to go-I can't do what I want to-I can't even say what I want to....I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to."
-Georgia O'Keeffe
"Art is one of two organs of human progress. By words man inter-
changes thoughts, by the forms of art he interchanges thoughts,
by the forms of art he interchanges feelings, and this with all
men, not only of the present time, but also of the past and future.
It is natural to human beings to employ both these organs of
intercommunication, and therefore the perversion of either of them
must cause equal results to the society in which it occurs. And
these results will be of two kinds: first, the absence, in that
society, of the work which should be performed by the organ; and
secondly, the harmful activity of the perverted organ. And just
these results have shown themselves in our society. The organ of
art has been perverted, and therefore the upper classes of society
have , to a great extent, been deprived of the work that it should
have performed. The diffusion in our society of enormous quantities
of, on the one hand, those counterfeits of art which only serve to
amuse and corrupt people , and, on the other hand, of works of in-
significant, exclusive art, mistaken for the highest art, have
perverted most men's capacity in
to be infected by true works of art, and have thus deprived them
of the possibility of experiencing the highest feelings to which
mankind has attained, and which can only be transmitted from man
to man by art. "
Tolstoy
"The art of our time and of our circle has become a prostitute.
And this comparison holds good even in minute details. Like her
it is not limited to certain times, like her it is always adorned,
like her it is always salable, and like her it is enticing and
ruinous. A real work of art can only arise in the soul of an artist
occasionally as the fruit of the life he has lived, just as a
child is conceived by its mother. But counterfeit art is produced
by artisans and handicraftsmen continually, if only real consumers
can be found. Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband,
needs no ornaments. but counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must
always be decked out. The cause of the production of real art is
the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated,
just as for a mother the cause of sexual conception is love.
The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain.
The consequences of true art is the introduction of a new feeling
into the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife's love is the birth
of a new man into life.
The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man,
pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual
strength. And this is what people of our day and of our circle should
understand, in order to avoid the filthy torrent of depraved and
prostituted art which we are deluged."
Leo
Tolstoy
What is Art
ARTIST
"The task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life."
Henry Miller
"The art manias of modern society, with their overvaluing of the
artist, indicate a decline of real artistic vigor, which is only
speciously covered over by the last flicker of a snobbish enthusiasm.
It is certain that artists nowadays do not create for the people, but
for the few exclusive groups, particularly of intellectuals who feel
themselves artists."
Otto Rank
Art & Artists
N.Y. Agathor Press 1975 P-427
"....Not that the work of the modern artist must by any means resemble the past, but he must show some sense of it, a realization of its presence and attraction. Otherwise he dissipates himself in sheer quality and fails to impose that order and shaping which are indispensable concomitants of high art, and without which the truly cultivated spectator is left thirsty. High art resumes everything that precedes it, otherwise it is less than high."
-Clement Greenberg July, 1948 Partisan Review
"In the highest aesthetic circles one now hears nothing about the artist's duty to us. It is all about our duty to him. He owes us nothing; we owe him "recognition," even though he has never paid the slightest attention to our tastes, interests, or habits. If we don't give it to him, our name is mud. In this shop, the customer is always wrong."
C.S. Lewis
The World's Last Night & Other Essays
"One theme that runs through the narratives of Seven Days in the Art World is that contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists. The artist Francis Bacon once said that when "Man" realizes that he is just an accident in the greater scheme of things, he can only "beguile himself for a time" He then added: "Painting, or all art, has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself....and the artist must really deepen the game to be any good at all." For many art world insiders and aficionados of other kinds, concept-driven art is a kind of existential channel through which they bring meaning to their lives. It demands leaps of faith, but it rewards the believer with a sense of consequence. Moreover, just as churches and other ritualistic meeting places serve a social function, so art events generate a sense of community around shared interests . When Eric Banks, a writer-editor who appears in Chapter 5, left an art magazine to edit a literary review, he realized that the fervent sociality of the art world had unexpected benefits. "People really do talk about the art they see." he gold me. "If I'm reading something by say, Robert Balano, I'll find very few people to discuss it with. Reading takes a long time and it's solitary whereas art fosters quick-forming imagined communities."
-Sarah Thornton
Seven Days In The Art World
"The feelings we experience when gazing at pieces of great art....can hardly be conveyed by words associated with pleasure, even the delight of the eye, or with the traditional idea of
beauty...the emotions which they inspire in us are of a quite different kind."
Tolstoy
"A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect The Man or Woman who is not of these is not a Christian."
William Blake
Commercial illustration didn't begin with the printing press. The oldmasters did little else. It was the modernists who invented the division between "fine" and "commercial' art, and of course devoted it totally in their own favor. It often seems one becomes a "fine" artist by insisting that his is, and convincing enough other people of it."
Tolstoy
"The art critics may write the books; the moneyed elite may determine the dollars-and-cents value; but its the public-unwashed, faceless mass despised by the critics and elite alike-that does the remembering and the loving, for its own reasons...and their reasons usually have little to-do with the subtleties of a self-indulgent painters inner visions."
Tolstoy
"The notion of making money by popular work, and then re-retiring to do good work on the proceeds, is one of the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.':
Logan Pearsall Smith
"The business of art lies in this-to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument might be incomprehensible and inaccessible"
Leo Tolstoy
...Art is a lie that tells the truth."
Picasso
No man can embrace True art until he has explored and cast
out false art."
Blake
"'It must never be forgotten that our interest in a work of art
is our interest in the quality of the mind that went into the
making of it. "
Charles Sims
"Vasari, who had seen a great deal of misery among his friends, both "freelance" and court painters, was appalled by the discrepancy between "the extraordinary rewards" bestowed on the most famous masters" and the plight of "those rare intellects who not only without reward, but in miserable poverty, bring forth their works." He firmly believed that, "If there were remuneration in this our age, they would without doubt, produce greater and better works that the ancients; but since they have to face famine rather than fame, these hapless artists remain ignored and unrecognized to the shame and disgrace of those who could raise them from obscurity and yet do not lift a finger."
Rudolf
& Margot Wittkower
Born
Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (1969)
"Perhaps there is no such thing as an 'avant-garde' , only a few uncorrupted sensibilities who cling together in times of rampant militarism or commercialism to challenge their elders."
Cyril
Connolly
Previous
Convictions (1963)
This is the first age in which the artist does not have a community; he must now, like all of us, make his own."
Robert Motherwell
"Art is the only way modern man will allow himself to be shown the unflattering, cruel, and hideous aspects of himself which are part of the daimonic."
Rollo May
"When associating with scholars and artists we easily miscalculate in opposite directions behind a remarkable scholar one finds, not infrequently, a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist quite often-a very remarkable man. "
Nietzsche
"Nothing is more common than to hear it said of reputed works of art, that they are very good but very difficult to understand. We are quite used to such assertions, and yet to say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that is very good, but most people can't eat it. The majority of men may not like rotten cheese or putrefying grouse-dishes esteemed by people with perverted tastes; but bread and fruit are only good when they please the majority of men. And it is the same with art. Perverted art may not please the majority of men, but good art always pleases every one."
Leo Tolstoy
"The soul is plastic, and a person who every day looks upon a beautiful picture , reads a page from some good book, and hears a beautiful piece of music will soon become a transformed person-one born again."
John Ruskin
" Art is the accomplice of love."
De Gourmont
"We sometimes tend to ascribe the attributes of artists to those of even minor talent and achievement. Let us keep things in perspective. Let us reserve the rank of "artist" to those who display talent of great merit. It is only then that we can honestly evaluate our own aims and desires, and perceive our own readiness to accept the demands artistry makes of us."
Bill Hixon
I rebel at the thought of some who claim to have been born with a talent. I believe is accorded only to those who endlessly strive and search for it-whether consciously or subconsciously."
Bill Hixon
"It is social man, and particularly urban man, who begins to produce the abortions which pass for modern art and reflect the chaos of his soul."
T.C.
Lethbridge
Witches
Citadel
Press
"The important artist is perhaps like an alchemist whose work, incommunicable to the general public, can nevertheless bring about the process of transmutation in certain especially receptive painters, poets, and musicians. These act as middlemen, popularizing in their own works one or two borrowed seminal ideas, and thereby help to form the artistic taste of a period. For the average viewer or reader, sensitive only to the passing value of the daily event, the painter in vogue or the popular novelist appears important because his work seems to express the sensibility of the time. The fact is that this is simply the mark of a successful man: his work, at best an imitation, at worst a watering down an explanation, is always a product destined for general consumption, which reaches an immense public. But if one is willing to consider the actual source of the product's success, one will recognize fairly readily the extreme importance of those artists whose work has in fact brought about the really significant change."
Michel
Sanouillet (1958)
intro to
Marcel Duchamp
The
Essential Writings of Duchamp
Thames
& Hudson-London Pub
"Art is produced by a succession of individuals expressing themselves; it is not a question of progress. Progress is merely an enormous pretension on our part."
Duschamp
"I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than another painter."
Duschamp
"I believe that art is the only form of activity in which man as man shows himself to be a true individual."
Duschamp
"The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates."
T.S. Eliot
"Can one make works which are not works of art?"
Duchamp
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience,"
Rebecca West
"Art is given us to redeem us. "'
Yolteotl: an Aztec word meaning: one whose heart is rooted in God. . .Artist/seer
"There is no such thing as modern art. There is art-and there is advertising.
Albert
Sterner
"Empire
Against Art"
"Art is one of the most profound means at man's disposal for comprehending reality. "'The Artist should take counsel of no man, but only of the passing wind that tells us the story of the world."
Debussey
"Blarney": the gift of beautifying truth for the benefit of the unimaginative. "The ego-mania of decadence, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art."
Max Nordau
"At ever period of history the number of good artists has been very small , the number of bad and indifferent artists very great. Because immense numbers of people now practice art as therapy, it does not follow that there will be any noticeable increase in the output of masterpieces. Because I feel better for having expressed my feelings in a daub, it does not follow that you will feel better for looking at my daub. On the contrary, you may feel considerably worse. So let us practice art-as-therapy, but never exhibit the stuff as though it were art-as-communications."
Aldous Huxley
"Successful artistic parents seem very rarely to give birth to equally successful artistic sons and daughters, and I suspect it may be because the urge to create, which must always be partly the need to escape everyday reality, is better fostered-despite modern educational theory-not by a sympathetic and 'creative' childhood environment, but the very opposite, by pruning and confining natural instinct. "
John
Fowles
The Tree
Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no Prince may depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy, and coarse farce."
Whistler
"It is also no reproach to the most finished scholar or greatest gentleman in the land that he be absolutely without eye for painting or ear for music-that in his heart he prefer the popular print to the scratch of Rembrandt's needle, or the songs, of the hall to Beethoven's C minor symphony.
Let him but have the wit to say so, and not feel the admission a proof of inferiority. Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no Prince may depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and any puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy, and coarse farce."
Whistler
"In my view the sense-perceptible aspect should be the important thing in a work of art, for I recognized that the path followed by the true artist is a path to the living spirit. He starts from what is physically perceptible, but he transforms it. And what guides him is not merely subjective impulse; rather he tries to impart to the sense-perceptible a form that makes it appear as if the spirit itself were visible. I said to myself that the beautiful is not an idea given the form of something sense-perceptible, but the sense-perceptible give the form of something spiritual. Thus to me art is a realm where the spirit world is transferred into the sense-perceptible world."
Rudolf
Steiner,
An
Autobiography
"Art is a habit-forming drug, Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered? The on-looker is as important as the artist, for one thing. The work of art is always based on these two poles of the maker and the onlooker who has the last word, remember-posterity makes the birth to something, like electricity. The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word, remember-posterity makes the masterpiece. No, I'm afraid I'm an agnostic in art. I don't believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug it's very useful for a number of people, very sedative, but as religion it's not even as good as God."
Duchamp
"Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting."
Tristan Tzara
"I don't believe in art, I believe in artists."
Duchamp
'There is no such thing as an immortal work of art. There is one art- the greatest of all, the art of making a complete human being of oneself. "
Orage
' "The subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless."
Mark Rothko
"We must participate in the great misery to come. We have to lay our hearts and nerves bare to the deceived cries of people who have been lied to. ..the sole justification for our existence as artists, superfluous and egotistic though we are, is to confront people with the image of their destiny."
Max
Beckman
1920
"Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities"
Paul
Klee
1920
I was returning, immersed in thought, from my sketching, when on opening the studio door, I was suddenly confronted by a picture of indescribable and incandescent loveliness. Bewildered, I stopped, staring at it. The painting lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object and was entirely composed of bright color patches. Finally I approached closer and only then saw it for what it really was-my own painting, standing on its side on the easel... One thing became clear to me: that objectiveness, the objects, needed no place in my paintings, and was indeed harmful to them. "
Kandinsky
1908
"I had made it clear, that a single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices for subjugation."
Clyfford Still
1946
My painting is the only true one. I am the first and unique artist of this century. The others are students and drivellers."
Courbet (1819-1877)
"The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated."
Joseph Beuys
"I think art is a basic metaphor for all social freedoms, but it should not be only a metaphor; it should be a real means, in daily life, to go in and transform the power fields of the society."
Joseph Beuys
"The stamping out of the artist is one of the blind goals of every civilization. When a civilization becomes so standardized that the civilization is dying., The "mass mind" has taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap heap."
Elie Faure
'Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs."
Charlotte Cushman
(1816-1876)
"Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter."
Tolstoy
"Accustoming people to something resembling art, disaccustoms them to the comprehension of real art, And that is how it comes about that none are more dull to art than those who have passed through the professional schools and been most successful in them. Professional schools produce an hypocrisy of art precisely akin to that hypocrisy of religion which is produced by Theological colleges for training priests, pastors, and religious teachers generally. As it is impossible in a school to train a man so as to make a religious teacher of him, so it is impossible to teach a man now to become an artist. Art schools are thus doubly destructive of art, first, in that they destroy the capacity to produce real art in those who have the misfortune to enter them and go through a seven or eight years;' course; secondly, in that they generate enormous quantities of that counterfeit art which perverts the taste of the masses and overflows our world . "
Leo Tolstoy
" "To distract my thoughts, I constructed in my dreams a faery palace, surpassing all imagination, everything the genius of a humble man could imagine (with grottoes, gardens, towers, castles, museums and sculptures) , trying to bring to a new birth all the ancient architectures of primitive times; the whole thing so beautiful and picturesque that the image of it remained alive in my brain for ten years at least. . .but the distance from dream to reality is great; I had never touched a mason's trowel,. . .and I was totally ignorant of the rules of architecture."
Ferdinand Cheval
(Cheval was a postman who had never done anything unusual in forty-three years of his life. One day (in 1879) he picked up a stone and began collecting and building much like our own Simon Rodia-He constructed a fantastic work of art of his yard) Inscribed all over the place was the following "Interior of an imaginary palace: The Pantheon of an obscure Hero.
THE END OF A DREAM, WHERE FANTASY BECOMES REALITY . "THE
WORK OF GIANTS. " REMEMBER: WILL IS POWER. " and: "FOR FORTY
YEARS I DUG TO MAKE THIS FAERY PALACE"
"We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity... . transfusing, welding and unifying.". . .a force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it into swift motion."
Ezra Pound
Tell me, frankly, what ought to remain of Lenin: an art bronze, oil
portraits, etchings watercolours his secretary's diary, his friends'
pictures and memoirs- a file of photographs taken of him at work and rest,
archives of his books, writing pads, notebooks, shorthand reports, films,
photograph records.
I don't think there's any choice. Art has no place in modern life. .
.Every cultured modern man must wage war against art, as against opium.
Photograph and be photographed!"
Rodchenko
All art is reactionary. The artist is 'beautiful' for others, talented' for others, 'ingenious' for others, which is a scornful or superior way of considering 'others' .
Daniel Buren
"True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy."
Louise Bogan
"The idea of "professional artist" should be tossed away. Everyone should be free to let his or her inner mind speak to her. And everyone is an artist when she does this."
Kenji Miyazawa
"The greatness of an artist lies in the building of an inner world, and in the ability to reconcile this inner world with the outer."
Einstein
'A real artist is nothing if not a working man and a damn hard one."
Edward Weston
"Art is the product of labor"
Pablo Casals
"The habit of art is the habit of enjoying vivid values."
Alfred
North Whitehead
Art is Civilization.
Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative Futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one, "
Walter Brueggmann
"Aestheticism is not style but a principle."
William Morris
"Art is as much a necessity for man as eating and drinking. The need for beauty and creation embodying it is inseparable from man and without it man would perhaps have refused to live in the world. Man craves it, finds and accepts beauty without any conditions just because it is beauty. ..Beauty is therefore inherent in everything that is healthy, that is to say, everything that is most of all alive and is a necessity of the human organism. It is harmony; it holds the promise of tranquility; it is the embodiment of man' s and Mankind ' s ideals . "
Dostoevsky
"Art deals with reality. Every artist of genius becomes a transformer of the meaning of the world. "
Andre Malraux
"Artists are now extraordinarily important to human society. who have kept their faculties and innate endowment of capabilities intact. The greatest of all their faculties is the ability of the imagination to formulate conceptually. I feel that it is the artists who have kept the integrity of childhood alive until we reached the bridge between the arts and sciences. "
Bucky Fuller
"Anti-art is made to sell for a profit--and concerns itself not with values but catering to superficial vanity, cruelty, sensuality. Anti-art appeals to the demonic in-human nature in. those forces which tend to animalize, isolate, and destroy man--the demons of Babylon, of the early Church, and of the Freudian subconscious have the same visage--
Malraux
The
voices of Silence
We cannot separate Art from the Artists spiritual attitude. "
Herman Raymond
"All great works of art are ' about God' in the sense that they provide a guide for the Perplexed. "
E . F. Schumacher
"Frequently the artist had conceived of the patterns or arrangements before the scientists had found their counter- parts in infra- or ultra-visible realms. The conceptual capability of the artists' intuitive formulation of the evolving new by subconscious coordination’s are tremendously important. "
R. Buckminster Fuller
"The truth is that all essential art is symbolical: it is deep, authentic reality; the end of art surpasses experimental reality, and is to express hidden reality, not in a direct way but by means of projected shadows.
Nicholas Berdyaev
Dostoevsky
Living Age Books published by Meridian Books
"I do most seriously agree with what you say about Art and Literature. To my mind they can only be healthy when they are either (a) admittedly aiming at nothing but innocent recreations or (b) definitely the handmaids of religious or at least moral truth."
from a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths O.S.B. 16 April 1940 from C. S. Lewis
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dreams, Dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother's milk and blackens it to make printer's ink to scoff at her and create ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist's work is to show us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new minds as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? That is the issue between them. and it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another."
George Bernard Shaw
Man and
Superman
Modern Art,: though seeming to deal with aesthetic problems, is really performing a work of psychological education on the public by breaking down and destroying their previous aesthetic views of what is beautiful in form and meaningful in content. The pleasing ness of the artistic product is replaced by chill abstractions of the most subjective nature Which brusquely slams the door on the naive and romantic delight in the senses and their obligatory love for the object. This tells us, in plain and universal language, that the prophetic spirit of art has turned away from the old object relationship and towards the-for the time being-dark chaos of subjectivisms. Certainly art, so far as we can judge of it' has not yet discovered in this darkness what it is that holds all men together and could give expression to their psychic wholeness. Since reflection seems to be needed for this purpose, it may be that such discoveries are reserved for other fields of endeavor. Great art till now has always derived its fruitfulness from the myth, from the unconscious process of symbolization which continues through the ages and which, as the primordial manifestation of the human spirit, will continue to be the root of all creation in the future. The development of modern art with its seemingly nihilistic trend towards disintegration just be understood as the symptom and symbol of a mood of world destruction and world renewal that has set its mark on our age .We are living in what the Greeks called the Kaupos - the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods. "
Carl Jung
'Art serves beauty. . .just as soon as art begins to take delight in that beauty which is already found, instead of the search for new beauty, an arrestment occurs and art becomes superfluous aestheticism, I believe that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love.
George Sand
"Art satisfies a human desire for oblivion and illusion."
Debussey
"Great works of art say all that can be said about man and the world,
Rodin
True art mediates between man's ordinary nature and his higher potentialities. Thus in the Divine Comedy, Beatrice
(religion) asks Virgil (art) to guide the lost Dante through the horrifying Inferno to Purgatory and eventually to
Paradise, where Dante meets Beatrice. "
E. F. Schumacher
Quest Magazine
"If it is to nourish and make the best grow, as plants are nourished and grow in suitable soils, it is to the understanding and not to fine feelings that an appeal must be made. In one respect the public is right; it always wants to know what a work of art is 'about' . . . .Let us tell them the painful truth that most of these (great) works of art are about God, whom we never mention in polite society."
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
"Until the dealers are driven out, the temples of art will not be a temple. But the art of the future will drive them out."
Tolstoy
"The artist of the future will understand that to compose a fairy-tale, a little song which will touch, a lullaby or a riddle which will entertain, a jest which will amuse, or to draw a sketch which will delight dozens of generations or millions of children and adults, is incomparably more important and more fruitful than to compose a novel or a symphony, or paint a picture which will divert some members of the wealthy classes for short time, and then be forever forgotten. The reign of this art of the simple feelings accessible to all is enormous, and it is yet almost untouched,"
Leo Tolstoy
Guernica was the last great history-painting. It was also the last modern painting of major importance that took its subject from politics with the intention of changing the way large numbers of people thought and felt about power. Since 1937, there have been a few admirable works of art that contained political references-one of Joseph Beuys' work or Robert Motherwell's 'Elegies to the Spanish Republic' , But the idea that an artist, by making painting or sculpture, could insert images into the stream of public speech and thus change political discourse has gone, probably for good, along with the nineteenth-century ideal of the artist as public man. Mass media took away the political speech of art. When Picasso painted Guernica, ' regular TV broadcasting had been in existence for only a year in England and nobody in France, except a few electronic experts, had seen a television set. There were perhaps fifteen thousand such sets in New York City. Television was too crude, too novel , to be altogether credible. The day when most people in the capitalist world would base their understanding of politics on what the TV screen gave them was still almost a generation away. But by the end of World War II, the role of the "war artist" had been rendered negligible by war photography. What did you believe, a drawing of an emaciated corpse in a pit that looked like bad, late German Expressionism, or the incontrovertible photographs from Belsen, Maidenek, and Auschwitz? It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world mass media society where art's principal social role is to be in- vestment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no 'effective' political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates "value" and becomes, ipso facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. If the Third Reich had lasted until now, the young bloods of the Inner Party would not be interested in old fogeys like Albert Speer or Arno Breker, Hitler's monumental sculptor; they would be queuing up to have their portraits silkscreened by Andy Warhol. It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say, This saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920s is that they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naiveté that made them think so. but it is certainly our loss that we can not. "
Robert
Hughes
The Shock of the New
Alfred Knopf N.Y.
"Art in our society has become so perverted that not only has bad art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what art really is has been lost. In order to be able to speak about the art of our society, it is, therefore, first of all necessary to distinguish art from counterfeit art."
Leo Tolstoy-
The Religious function of Art
"By the end of the 1970s, the variety of gestures that could be called art had given the 'coup de grace' to the idea of historical necessity on which the very conception of an 'avante-garde' was based. The hegemony of abstract painting had simply come undone, partly because art's newly acquired mass public was starved of images, but also because the idea of a determinable "mainstream" had no 'avant-garde' left to serve. Instead of A leading B,C, and the rest, there was an open field where every kind of art coexisted within the same social frame. And this frame was inordinately wide. Every five years, the art schools of America alone produced as many graduates as there were people in Florence in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. There were said to be more commercial galleries in New York than bakers. The grand illusion of American culture, that creativity is necessarily good for you and that contact with works of art is morally improving, had created the right conditions for a glut of art schools in the 1950s. In the sixties there was a glut of students, and in the seventies a glut of teachers, since the art-education system had in effect created a proletariat of artists, a pool of unemployable talent for which the society could find no use except as trainers of more pupils. These conditions of turnover were not, to put it mildly, favorable to either the upkeep of standards or the constant secretion of adrenalin. It was a good deal easier to give a graduation pass mark for photographing 650 garages in suburban San Diego, or spending a week shut in a gym-locker at UCLA with a urine-bottle and calling it "a duration-confinement body-piece, than to insist on even moderately exacting and hence "elitist" tests of technical prowess.
Robert Hughes
Shock of the New
"No painting is wholly abstract. All art, in some way or another, is situated in the world, hoping to act as a transformer between the self and the non-self. The great project of modernism was to propagate more ways in which this could be done. But any view of art that insists on locating art's meaning in its power to do what had not been done before tends to reject the benefits of the modernist spirit: it exchanges ideological cramp and historicist narrowness for the anxious and open discourse our cultural parents bequeathed us. The signs of that constriction are everywhere today-in the small ambitions of art, in its lack of any effort towards spirituality, in its sense of career rather than vocation, in its frequently bland occupation with semantics at the expense of the deeper passions of the creative self. Perhaps the great energies of modernism are still latent in our culture, like Ulysses' bow in the house of Penelope; but nobody seems able to string and draw it. Yet the work still speaks to us, in all its voices, and will continue to do so. Art discovers its true social use, not on the ideological plane, but by opening the passage from feeling to meaning-not for everyone, since that would be impossible, but for those who want to try. This impulse seems to be immortal. Certainly it has existed from the origins of human society, and despite the appalling commercialization of the art world, its flight into corporate ethics and strategies, and its gradual evacuation of spirit, it exists today."
Robert Hughes
All art is reactionary. The artist is 'beautiful' for others, 'talented' for others, 'ingenious' for others, which is a scornful or superior way of considering 'others'.
Daniel Buren
True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.
Louise Bogan
(Cheval was a postman who had never done anything unusual in forty-three years of his life. One day (in 1879) he picked up a stone and began collecting and building much like our own Simon Rodia (he constructed a fantastic work of art of his yard). Inscribed all over the place was the following: "Interior of an imaginary palace: The Pantheon of an obscure Hero. THE END OF A DREAM, WHERE FANTASY BECOMES REALITY. THE WORK OF GIANTS. REMEMBER: WILL IS POWER. and: "FOR FORTY TEARS I DUG TO MAKE THIS FAERY PALACE"
We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity...transfusing, welding and unifying...a force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it into swift motion.
Ezra Pound
Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter.
Tolstoy
Accustoming people to something resembling art, disaccustoms them to the comprehension of real art, and that is how it comes about that none are more dull to art than those who have passed through the professional schools and been most successful in them. Professional schools produce an hypocrisy of art precisely akin to that of religion which is produced by theological colleges for training priests, pastors, and religious teachers generally. As it is impossible in a school to train a man so as to make a religious teacher of him, so it is impossible to teach a man how to become an artist. Art schools are thus doubly destructive of art, first, in that they destroy the capacity to produce real art in those who have the misfortune to enter them and go through a seven or eight year course; secondly, in that they generate enormous quantities of that counterfeit art which perverts the taste of the masses and overflow our world.
Leo Tolstoy
The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated.
Joseph Beuys
The stamping out of the artist is one of the blind goals of every civilization. When a civilization becomes so standardized that the civilization is dying, the "mass mind" has taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap heap.
Elie Faure
Anyone who presumes to teach art has no understanding of it
Eleonora Duce
"Artist" refers to a person willfully enmeshed in the dilemma of categories, who performs as if none of them existed...the contemporary artist is not out to supplant recent modern art with a better kind; 'he wonders what art might be.'
Allan Kaprow (ok 1966)
The art of our time and of our circle has become a prostitute. And this comparison holds good even in minute details. Like her, it is not limited to certain times, like her it is always adorned, like her it is always salable, and like her it is enticing and ruinous. A real work of art can only arise in the soul of an artist occasionally as the fruit of the life he has lived, just as a child is conceived by it's mother. But counterfeit art is produced by artisans and handicraftsmen continually, if only real consumers can be found. Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments, but counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of the production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated, just as for a mother the cause of sexual conception is love. The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequences of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife's love is the birth of a new man into life. The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength. And this is what people of our day and of our circle should understand, in order to avoid the filthy torrent of depraved and prostituted art which we are deluged.
Leo Tolstoy
What is Art
The task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life.
Henry Miller
The art manias of modern society, with their overvaluing of the artist, indicate a decline of real artistic vigor, which is only speciously covered over by the last flicker of a snobbish enthusiasm. It is certain that artists nowadays do not create for the people, but for the few exclusive groups, particularly of intellectuals who feel themselves artists.
Otto Rank
Art & Artists
NY Agathor Press 1975 P-427
The feelings we experience when gazing at pieces of great art...can hardly be conveyed by words associated with pleasure, even the delight of the eye, or with the traditional idea of beauty...the emotions which they inspire in us are of a quite different kind.
Leo Tolstoy
A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect. The man or woman who is not one of them is not a Christian.
William Blake
"Books on art, even books on artists, characteristically have little to say about actually making art. They may offer a sprinkling of romantic parables about "the artist's struggle", but the prevailing premise remains that art is clearly the province of genius (or, on occasion, madness). Accepting this premise leads inescapably to the conclusion that while art should be understood or enjoyed or admired by the reader, it most certainly should not be done by the reader. And once that kinship between reader and artist has been denied, art itself becomes a strange foreign object-something to be pointed to and poked at from a safe analytical distance. To the critic, art is a noun.
Cleary, something's getting lost in the translation here. What gets lost, quite specifically, is the very thing artists spend the better part of their lives doing: namely, learning to make work that matters to them. What artists learn from other artists is not so much history or technique (although we learn tons of that too): what we really gain from the artmaking of others is courage-by-association. Depth of contact grows as fears are shared-and thereby disarmed-and this comes from embracing art as process, and artists as kindred spirits. To the artist, art is a verb."
-David Bayles & Ted Orland
Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
The business of art lies in this - to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.
Leo Tolstoy
Art is a lie that tells the truth
Picasso
No man can embrace true art until he has explored and cast out false art.
Blake
It must never be forgotten that our interest in a work of art is our interest in the quality of the mind that went into the making of it.
Charles Sims
Art is the accomplice of love.
De Gourmont
Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered? The onlooker is as important as the artist, for one thing. The work of art is always based on these two poles of the maker and the onlooker who has the last word, remember - posterity makes the birth to something, like electricity. The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word, remember - posterity makes the masterpiece. No, I'm afraid I'm an agnostic in art. I don't believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug it's very useful for a number of people, very sedative, but as religion it's not even as good as God.
Duchamp
Orage
If you have a grandiose concept, and if you can work with it, I don't see why not.
Louise Nevelson
I thought everyone knew that the purpose of art is to inspire the creation of a beautiful city.
Louse Nevelson
A white lace curtain on the windows was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement, I learned more about art from that than in school.
Louise Nevelson
Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?
Ludwig van Beethoven (1970-1827) from a letter to Bettina von Amim Aug. 11, 1810
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Willa Cather
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance...and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of it's process.
Henry James
To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile - such is the aim, difficult and evanescent "of the artist."
Joseph Conrad
preface to
Nigger of the Narcissus
In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one know, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed. It is therefore necessary to present oneself with the greatest humility; white, pure, and candid with a mind as if empty, in a spiritual state analogous to that of a communicant approaching the Lord's Table. Obviously it is necessary to have all of one's experience behind one, but to preserve the freshness on one's instincts.
Henri Matisse
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Andre Gide
As the influence of religion declines, the social importance of art increases; we must beware of exchanging good religion for bad art.
Aldous Huxley
The whole of art is one long roll of revelation, and it is revealed only to those whose minds are to some extent what Horace, speaking of a woman whose heart is free, calls vacant. It is not for those whose minds are muddied with the dirt of politics, or heated with the vulgar chatter of society.
Sickert
There is no democracy in the arts.
Ezra Pound
Art is a kind of illness.
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
The work of the artist is to heal the soul.
Kathleen Paine
Only conscience can produce great art.
Rafael Hubelik
Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.
Jose Ortega y
Gasset
The Dehumanization of Art (1925)
Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
Octavio Paz
"The real meaning of this Cubist movement is nothing else than the total destruction of the art of painting."
-Kenyon Cox Harper's Weekly, Mar 15,1913
I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.
Henry Miller
"So-called modern or contemporary art in our modern beloved country contains all the isms of depravity, decadence and destruction. Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. Futurism aims to destroy by a machine myth. Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. Klee, one of its three founders, went to the insane asylums for his inspiration. Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms. Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason. Salvador Dali....Spanish surrealist, is now in the United States. He is reported to carry with him at all times a picture of Lenin. Abstractionism, or non-objectivity in so-called modern art, was spawned as a simon-pure, Russian communist product....Who has brought down this curse upon us; who has let into our homeland this horde of germ-carrying art vermin?"
-George A. Dondero (U.S. Representative from Michigan-Speech to Congress Aug 19,1949)
But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theatre.
Stanley Elkin
Middle Ages - Art for God's sake.
Renaissance - Art for Man's sake.
Nineteenth Century - Art for Art's sake.
Twentieth Century - No Art for God's sake.
"THE ART WORLD IS THE BIGGEST JOKE GOING. It's a rest home for the over privileged. The pretentious, and the weak. And modern Art is a disgrace-never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little."
-Banksy
"Let us then, admit that the greater part of what is taught in the Fine Arts departments of our Universities, all of the psychologies of are, all the obscurities of modern aesthetics, are only so much verbiage, only a kind of defense that stands in the way of our understanding of the wholesome art, at the same time iconographically true and practically useful, that was once to be had in the market place or from any good artist; and that whereas the rhetoric that cares for nothing but a false rhetoric, and a flattery of human weakness by which we can only account for the arts that have no other purpose than to please.
....However this may be, we also pretend to a "scientific" and "Objective" discipline of the "history and appreciation of art, "in which we take account not only of contemporary or very recent art but also of the whole of art from the beginning until now....(Yet) I put it to you that it is not by our aesthetic, but only by their rhetoric, that we can hope to understand and interpret the arts of other peoples and other ages than our own: I put it to you that our present university courses in this field embody a pathetic fallacy, and are anything but scientific in any sense. "
Coomaraswamy
"There is little doubt that the mythological paintings of Titian and his contemporaries were regarded as explicitly erotic images. Titian himself would have agreed. In a letter to Philip II, he wrote that after the 'Danae where one could see everything from the front', he promised to send another painting, of Venus and Adonis, in which it would possible to view' just to vary things....the other side' Ludovico Dole, a friend and admirer of titian's wrote to Alessandro Contarini about the same Venus and adonis:
the miraculous shrewdness of that divine spirit (Titian) is also revealed that in her intimate parts we recognize the creases on the flesh caused by her seated position. Why, it can in truth be said that every stroke of the brush is one of those strokes that nature executes with its own hand....I swear to you, sir, that there is no man so keen in sight or judgment, that seeing does not believe her alive; not anyone made so cold by the years, or so hardened in his being who does not feel a warming, a softening, a stirring of the blood in his veins. it is a real marvel....."
Joanna Pitman
On Blondes
"The painter's power over men's minds is even greater (than the poet's) for he can induce them....to fall in love with a picture which does not portray any living woman.....it once happened to me that I made a picture representing a sacred subject which was bought by one who love it and who then wished to remove the symbols of divinity in order that he might kiss her without misgivings. Finally his conscience overcame his sighs of desire and he....was obliged to remove the painting from his house."
-Leonardo da Vinci
"Art seems somehow to have arisen from play, in a uniquely human spinoff process which has acquired a life of its own. Both involve imitation, pretending, a measure of fantasy, the freedom to improvise, to make and break rules and create surprise. But this insight, however plausible and frequently voiced over the years, raises more questions than it answers, a major reason being that play is a complex and poorly understood activity. The word itself is highly misleading, an intellectual boobytrap. it implies something useless, something not to be taken seriously; and yet everything we know about evolution argues that it is to be taken very seriously indeed.
Play is something new under the sun. It appeared after 4.3 billion virtually play-free years, in times when the planet's surface consisted of a single great ocean surrounding a single land mass or super island just beginning to split into continents. It appeared some 200 million years ago with the appearance of warm-blooded animals.
Play must have been extremely important in recent evolution, all the more so because it entails a number of major disadvantages. it uses up energy which might be better devoted to feeding, resting, or less vigorous socializing, and often results in serious injuries from falls and extra-vulnerable to predators. To outweigh the risks play must offer especially high survival premiums, such as providing training or practice for real-life fighting and escape tactics, and promoting friendships and cooperation among individuals who will be spending many years together.
-Howard Rheingold: Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds-and How it Promises to Transform society
"Steve jobs cried a lot. This is one of the salient facts about his subject that Isaacson reveals, and it is salient not because it shows Jobs's emotional depth, but because it is an example of his stunted character. Steve Jobs cried when he didn't get his own way. He was a bully, a dissembler, a cheap-skate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator, and sometimes he was very nice. Isaacson does not shy away from any of this, and the trouble is that Jobs comes across as such a repellent man, cruel even to his best friend Steve Wozniak, derisive of almost everyone, ruthless to people who thought they were his friends, indifferent to his daughters, that the book is often hard to read. Friends and former friends speculate that his bad behavior was a consequence of being put up for adoption at birth. A former girlfriend, who went on to work in the mental health field, thought he had narcissistic Personality Disorder. John Sculley, who orchestrated Job's expulsion from Apple, wondered if was bipolar. Jobs himself dismissed his excesses with a single word: artist. Artists, he seemed to believe, got a pass on bad behavior. Isaacson seems to think so, too, proving that it is possible to write a hagiography even while exposing the worst in a person."
Review on STEVE JOBS by Walter Issacson The New York Review of Books Jan 12, 2012
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Book: "History of Art" by Jacques Thullier
Book: "The Oxford Dictionary of Art 3rd Edition "Edited by Jan Chivers
Book: "Atlas of World Art" ed by John Onians
Book: "The Oxford History of Western Art" ed by Martin Kemp
Book: "New Art City" by Jed Perl
Book: "Art And Homosexuality: A History of Ideas" by Christopher Reek
Book: "Art Beyond the West: The Arts of Africa, India and Southeast Asia, China, Japan and Korea, The Pacific, and the Americas: by Michael Kampen O' Riley
Book: "Art in the Modern Era: A Guide to Styles, Schools & Movements-1860 to the Present" by Amy Dempsey
Book: "The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005, " by Hilton Kramer & Ivan R. Dee
Book: "Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century"
Book: "Art In Theory,1648-1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas" Ed. by Charles Harrison et al
Book: "Encounters With Great Painters: The Artists, Bacon, Balthus, Braque, Chagall, Dali, Delvaux etc." by Claude Azoulay
Book: "Art: A New History" by Paul Johnson
Book: "Art History, Revised Ed. " by Marilyn Stokstad
Book: "Outsider: John Rockwell on the Arts, 1967-2006" by John Rockwell
Book: "Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History" by Alex Potts
book: "Raphael" by Pierluigi De vecchi
Book: "Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp" Ed. by F.M. Naumann & H. Obalk
Book: "The End of Art" by Donald Kuspit
Book: "Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews" by Michael Fried
Book: "Art of the 20th Century" ed by Ingo F. Walther
Book: "Art Since 1900: Modernism, Anti-modernism, Postmodernism" by Hal Foster
Book: "What Happened to Art Criticism?" by James Elkins
Book:" Transgressions: The Offences of Art" by Anthony Julius
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