More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers hi...mself a valid critic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The disaster ... is not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect--this belief that the arts ar...e dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when I finish reading People, I always feel that I have just spent four days in Los Angeles. Women's Wear Daily at least makes... me feel dirty; People makes me feel that I haven't read or learned or seen anything at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The analogy between baseball fans and jazz fans is closer, it seems to me, than that between other audiences. The aficionados are ...aware of and concerned with the refinements of performance and the particular kinds of poetry in both solo and ensemble performances. (A beautifully executed double steal is as elegant as a Goodman arpeggio.) Like baseball fans, jazz fans know who played where and with whom and to what effect; they talk a rarefied language and drop the names of clarinetists and percussionists as baseball fans do the names of long-forgotten (except by them) shortstops and spitballers. Their retention of detail is prodigious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each p...erformer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I should say that the most prominent scientific men of our country, and perhaps of this age, are either serving the arts and not p...ure science, or are performing faithful but quite subordinate labors in particular departments. They make no steady and systematic approaches to the central fact.... There is wanting constant and accurate observation with enough of theory to direct and discipline it. But, above all, there is wanting genius.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts ...have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the distinctions among the arts are distinctions among the sensorial directions of aesthetic expression (sight, speech, hearing...), the visual arts crystallize a state of mind at its farthest point, where it borders on the images of things. The verbal arts seem instead to arrest the uncertain impression which a state of mind produces in us before it assumes that simplification which is able to reconcile it with space and make it a visual image. One is reminded of what Matthew Arnold said, that "poetry is more intellectual than art, more interpretative ... poetry is less artistic than the arts, but in closer correspondence with the intelligential nature of man, who is defined, as we know, 'a thinking animal'"; poetry thinks and arts do not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romanti...c, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »