It's a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind) & unformed & unimportant drivel; & until the raw ingredients of a ...pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation & thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art p...urifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all agree now--by "we" I mean intelligent people under sixty--that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful becaus...e it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter does not end there: a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly... futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and ...no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole. But religion is essentially cosmological, though its cosmology is always an imaginative cosmology. Any given religious experience can be fitted by this cosmology into the scheme of the whole, and labeled as an ascent into the third heaven, a temptation of the devil, and so forth. Hence religion is social, as art can never be. The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work. But the sociability of religion is part of its fundamental nature. The life of religion is always the life of a church.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all wh...o could behold it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art... is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psycholo...gy, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »