What is art? What is beauty? What is the meaning of a work of art?
Everything molten deserves a mold. Passion is molten. Passion's mold is art.
Art is the pin in the butterfly of life.
Art is alchemy, not literally turning lead into gold, but turning life into art, i.e. figuratively turning lead into gold.
Art believes in stable identity, but no living personality is coherent. Therefore, art falsifies the living in order to approximate life.
Personal taste or predilection has no place in the construction of a definition or building a philosophy. In defining art, for example, it's a mistake to assume that everything you like is art and must fit into your definition. I like very much the caffeinated manifesti of Tzara and Marinetti, the mad randomness of Smart and Huidobro, the mannered fragmentation of Barbellion and Traherne, the epistolary brilliance of Byron and Henry Miller, but why must my definition of art have to include everything I like? Why must my definition of art exclude my tepid affections-Wharton or Turgenev or James? The reasons I like and do not like specific works or writers are quite separate from my ideas about what makes art.
Hell is a library with only one book: The Ambassadors.
Tastes change. What was beautiful in one age is considered beautiful no longer. The great problem of art criticism is how to recapture a historical sense of beauty.
The sordid: a legitimate subject for art. there is sordid art but no such thing as ugly art. When one talks about ugly art, one usually means repulsive or sordid art. Art and ugliness are incompatible. Ugly is a handling, not a subject. One can say with absolute conviction that painting is ugly but only if one means that painting is artistically incompetent. art is order; ugliness is disorder.
Things too neat are also untrue.
A perfect face is not an interesting face. Cosmetic surgeons understand only perfection. If you wanted to improve your appearance, you'd be better off going to a cosmetic artist.
We live in a pornographic world, a world in which we watch the movement of football players in football games, the mien and posture of fashion models, study sociology abstracted from history and literature, biology disembodied of theology and geometry, astronomy absent from music and architecture. The impulse for pornography is the impulse for isolation, that is to say, separate study. All focused observation, all specialization, is pornographic. Pornography is rooted in seeing the thing, whatever it happens to be, in isolation. Pornography is anything that focuses on the part to the exclusion of the whole.
Pornography is the metonymy of vision.
Awareness isn't an infinite good.
The shocking, the absurd, the uncanny, the grotesque, the sublime-these are the drugs of art. We have to keep upping the ante to regain the rush.
We teach ourselves our talent. We train our minds to think as artists, to think as builders, to think as poets, to think as salesman, to think as managers, to think as lawmakers, to think as teachers. We train our minds to think in stories, in sales, in scenes, in structures, in images, in lectures, in ideas, in jokes, in designs, in colors, in formulae, in equations, in slogans, in insights.
In great art, we watch the artist's thinking unfold. In the greatest art, we watch our thinking unfold.
When I reread a book or revisit an artwork , I also scan the person I once was.
Real understanding always comes as a tear in the tissue. There's no mending the breakthrough.
The beginning of understanding is observation.
Everything artistic partakes of beauty. Sordidness of presentation and repellent subject matter or ideology are irrelevant. Swift. Celine. George Grosz. Otto Dix. Leni Riefenstahl. Ivan Albrecht. Diane Arbus. Robert Mapplethorpe. Nan Goldin. Lolita.
Art is an ideological whore who'll sleep with any propaganda or point of view. That's why there can be socialist art, Catholic art, Nazi art, racist art. Art: a promiscuous mistress. Leni Riefenstahl is no different from Piero della Francesca or Giotto. The great Catholic art of the Renaissance is just the other side of despicable political propaganda.
When the future becomes obsessed with the better, the past begins to be extinguished as the worse.
The dark edge of the profound is silly: Meister Eckhart, Swedenborg. The dark edge of the silly is profound: Lewis Carroll, Calvino.
Only the mason has the deepest understanding of the imperfections of his wall.
People are afraid of artworks having only one meaning as if that were somehow undemocratic or autocratic or fascist. Complex works of art have complex meanings. Complex doesn't mean multiple.
Misunderstanding is also understanding.
There is the imagination of the creator and there is the imagination of the audience. They are antagonists.
The clearer one's sense of self, the sharper one's vision.
Great art is like an attack of smallpox. after it inhabits the body, it leaves a permanent scar.
Art is tidy. Life is incoherent.
Literature is a vanity mirror. We stare into another person's soul and see only ourselves.
The purpose of literature is not to set us dreaming but to discipline our dreams.
