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 »
No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, t...he first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents do get very angry with their parents, and acknowledging this anger is part of acknowledging them. If the anger is not ...acknowledged then its expression is increased. The parent seems super-strong. The adolescent tries to become the super-attacker.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A journal intime is a super-confidante to whom everything is told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret su...per-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two women and one of them is being deceived...I would have my wife know all about me and if I cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One should speak of television's cold light, and why it is inoffensive to the imagination (including the imagination of children).... It is innocuous because it no longer conveys an imaginary, for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. Here it contrasts with the cinema which (though increasingly contaminated by television) is still endowed with an intense imaginary--because it is an image. This is not simply to speak of film as a mere screen or visual form, but as a myth, something that still resembles a double, a mirror, a fantasy, a dream, etc. None of this is in the TV image. It doesn't suggest anything, it mesmerizes.... It is only a screen or, better, it is a miniaturized terminal that immediately appears in your head (you are the screen and the television is watching you), transistorizes all your neurons and passes for a magnetic tape--a tape, not an image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a t...race of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera len...s and the eye both register images--because of their sensitivity to light--at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unjust that Italy should claim musical pre-eminence, even forcing Italian on music as its international language, when Italy...'s genius is so visual. No nation can build towns as beautiful nor claim a better right to regard nature as a shapeless substance to be redeemed by urbifaction. The Italians are not Wordsworthian. Man fulfils himself in the town. There is too much wild nature in music, and it has to be tamed into simple four-square patterns, as in Verdi and Bellini. The tenor does not proclaim Byronically to the woods and hills: he is a kind of sexy politician for the town piazza. The Italians would listen to Aaron, but not to Moses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a conceptual depth as well as a purely visual depth. The first is discovered by science; the second is revealed in art. T...he first aids us in understanding the reasons of things; the second in seeing their forms. In science we try to trace phenomena back to their first causes, and to general laws and principles. In art we are absorbed in their immediate appearance, and we enjoy this appearance to the fullest extent in all its richness and variety. Here we are not concerned with the uniformity of laws but with the multiformity and diversity of intuitions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »