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 »
In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion--or a new form of Christianity--based on faith in financial mi...racles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's a rare parent who can see his or her child clearly and objectively. At a school board meeting I attended . . . the only defin...ition of a gifted child on which everyone in the audience could agree was "mine."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But among all our Methods of moving Pity or Terror, there is none so absurd and barbarous, and what more exposes us to the Contemp...t and Ridicule of our Neighbours, than that dreadful butchering of one another, which is so very frequent upon the English Stage. To delight in seeing Men stabbed, poisoned, racked, or impaled, is certainly the Sign of a cruel Temper: And as this is often practised before the British Audience, several French Criticks, who think these are grateful Spectacles to us, take Occasion from them to represent us a People that delight in Blood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Taylor and the Painter often contribute to the Success of a Tragedy more than the Poet. Scenes affect ordinary Minds as much a...s Speeches; and our Actors are very sensible, that a well-dressed Play has sometimes brought them as full Audiences, as a well-written one.... But however the Show and Outside of the Tragedy may work upon the Vulgar, the more understanding Part of the Audience immediately see through it, and despise it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise C...ommiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The old guard may grumble and occasionally sue, but in a society where Portnoy's Complaint is a record-breaking best- seller sexua...l permissiveness is no longer an issue. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve-ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If any proof were needed of the progress of the cause for which I have worked, it is here tonight. The presence on the stage of th...ese college women, and in the audience of all those college girls who will some day be the nation's greatest strength, will tell their own story to the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of... the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »