Like the international avant-garde, rock-and-roll is the creative product of a rebellious youth culture trying to reach a mass aud...ience. Its artists embrace technological innovation. Their lives and personal styles are often counterculture. Many rock groups have appropriated creative strategies of modern art history: Some stage acts can be seen as Neo-Dada performance, others have lifted ideas from the Surrealists, the Situationists, and other art groups. Although pop music has its individual stars like Elvis and Madonna, most rock musicians, like the international avant-garde, work collaboratively, in bands. But however much a rock-and-roll group may initially appeal to a specific youth subculture, its potential for vast global audiences is different from that of fine art, which remains within the arcane reaches of high culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art to me was a state, it didn't need to be an accomplishment. By any of the standards of production, achievement, performance, I ...was not an artist. But I always thought of myself as one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is... left to the fighter's honor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, t...he failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every actor and musician has a text upon which to base his art, but he can treat the text in one of two ways. The difference lies ...in how much the performer believes his own work can be "notated." In music, this means asking how far the system of musical signs printed on the page can actually represent the music the composer heard in his head. If you believe these signs--the notes, the loud and soft markings, tempo indications--are an adequate language, then in performing the piece you concentrate on realizing in sound what you, the performer, read. If you believe music cannot be adequately notated, then your task in the performance is to find what is missing from the printed page. The actor has a similar choice. He can treat the text either as a set of suggestions for a character in Shakespeare's or Ibsen's mind, suggestions which cannot be ignored, but leave him much freedom, or he can treat the text as bible which, once understood, will tell him how to act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like the ballet. Or like a performance in the theater. When I step on the court I f...eel like Anna Pavlova. Or like Adelina Patti. Or even like Sarah Bernhardt. I see the footlights in front of me. I hear the whisperings of the audience. I feel an icy shudder. Win or die! Now or never! It's the crisis of my life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded....... He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.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 »