We all agree now--by "we" I mean intelligent people under sixty--that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful becaus...e it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter does not end there: a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in ...creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small- minded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps, the highest pleasure in art is identical with the highest pleasure in scientific theory. The emotion which accompanies th...e clear recognition of unity in a complex seems so similar in art and in science that it is difficult not to suppose that they are psychologically the same. It is, as it were, the final stage of both processes. This unity-emotion in science supervenes upon a process of pure mechanical reasoning; in art it supervenes upon a process of which emotion has all along been an essential concomitant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Baudelaire compared the great names in art to lighthouses posted along the track of historic time. The simile, as he used it, seiz...es the imagination and represents a great truth, but it allows of an interpretation which the limits of a sonnet form forbade him to develop. He takes the lights of his beacons as much for granted as the sailor does the lights of real lighthouses. But the lighthouses of art do not burn with so fixed and unvarying a lustre. The light they give is always changing insensibly with each generation, now brighter, now dimmer, and often enough growing bright once more. But we sometimes forget that the lights have to be tended or they grow faint and may expire altogether. For them to burn brightly, they must be fed by the devotion of some few spirits in each generation. If that fails for a long period they go out and become one of those dead, ineffectual names which still linger on, obstructions rather than aids to the historical voyager.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern o...f the artist and the bafflement of the public.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The photographic enthusiast likes to lure us into a darkened room in order to display his slides on a silver screen. Aided by the ...adaptability of the eye and by the borrowed light from the intense projector bulb, he can achieve those relationships in brightness that will make us dutifully admire the wonderful autumn tints he photographed on his latest trip. As soon as we look at a print of these photographs by day, the light seems to go out of them. It is one of the miracles of art that the same does not happen there. The paintings in our galleries are seen one day in bright sunshine and another day in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, yet they remain the same paintings, ever faithful, ever convincing. To a marvelous extent they carry their own light within. For their truth is not that of a perfect replica, it is the truth of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Van Gogh was right in saying that the method he had chosen could be compared to that of caricature. Caricature had always been "ex...pressionist," for the caricaturist plays with the likeness of his victim, and distorts it to express just what he feels about his fellow man. As long as these distortions of nature sailed under the flag of humour nobody seemed to find them difficult to understand. Humourous art was a field in which everything was permitted, because people did not approach it with the prejudices they reserved for Art with a capital A. But the idea of a serious caricature, of an art which deliberately changed the appearance of things not to express a sense of superiority, but maybe love, or admiration, or fear, proved indeed a stumbling block as Van Gogh had predicted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
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 »