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 »
Experiments in the visual arts (the invention of new ways of seeing things), are made because, due to the way the apparatus that m...akes up the mind is made, old processes and patterns have continually to be broken up in order to make it possible to perceive the new aspects and arrangements of evolving consciousness. The great enemy of intelligence is complacency.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In fear, one flees. One can pretend to fear, accordingly, by pretending to flee, a vigorous activity in which there may be little ...visible difference between pretense and reality. In horror, on the other hand, there is passivity, the passivity of presence. One stands (or sits) aghast, frozen in place, "glued to one's seat." ... Horror involves a helplessness which fear evades. The evasive activities of fear may be pointless, even self-defeating, but they are activities nonetheless, activities that can be feigned. Horror is a spectator's emotion, and thus it is especially well-suited for the cinema and the visual arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words--that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canva...s or chisels into stone or notes of music--those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. "Close analysis" is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism.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 »
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 »
... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is w...ind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »