Everywhere, the ethical predicament of our time imposes itself with an urgency which suggests that even the question "Have we anyt...hing to eat?" will be answered not in material but in ethical terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The two most potent post-war orthodoxies--socialist politics and modernist art--have at least one feature in common: they are both... forms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Think about the pressure to "pass" by lying about one's age ... that familiar temptation to falsify a condition of one's birth or ...identity and pretend to be part of a more favored group. Fair-skinned blacks invented "passing" as a term, Jews escaping anti-Semitism perfected the art, and the sexual closet continues the punishment, but pretending to be a younger age is probably the most encouraged form of "passing," with the least organized support for "coming out" as one's true generational self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sight of a Black nun strikes their sentimentality; and, as I am unalterably rooted in native ground, they consider me a work o...f primitive art, housed in a magical color; the incarnation of civilized, anti-heathenism, and the fruit of a triumphing idea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control o...ver what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is t...o things made by his art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art--that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, express...ed by every means available to the arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to th...e natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »