Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the arti...st's work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation. Art is the laboratory for making new men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pione...er and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one ...side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as t...hey are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it.... Advanc...ed art today is no longer a cause--it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new ins...ight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others ...have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »