Quotes by Art Critics - Page 2

One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one.
Denis Diderot
Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rape followed by gratitude.
Robert Hughes
Let us then understand at once that change or variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one shape.
John Ruskin
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Kakuzō Okakura
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
John Berger
In joy or sadness flowers are our constant friends.
Kakuzō Okakura
The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong ? To those who can app|y it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialtsts?
John Berger
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
John Ashbery
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
John Ruskin
You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea
Frank O'Hara
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger
Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
Kakuzō Okakura
willow trees, willow trees they remind me of DesdemonaI'm so damned literaryand at the same time the waters rushing past remindme of nothing
Frank O'Hara
Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.
Martin Gayford
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
John Ruskin
The happiness of being envied is glamour.Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
John Berger
Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.
Denis Diderot
But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.
Kakuzō Okakura
No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
John Ruskin
I find no reason to think that aging is genetically determined. Genes do not provide information for the development of the individual beyond growth and the reproductive process in which the genes are transmitted to the next generation. Once past the reproductive stage, the individual has served the purposes of preservation of the species, and then he is on his own. The wrinkled human face is the victim of gravity and of cumulative errors in the reproduction of cells. Since aging is not programed, but is a badly improvised interference with youthful beauty, we have improvised an operation to counteract its effects. Aging is a form of misinformation. If we get the facts right, you will be able to read it in our faces. ("Motherhood")
William S. Wilson
The woman who undergoes this operation can sense the morphogenetic field at work in her face. She can feel the lines of force as they guide the embryonic cells into the patterns they must form. Why should a woman let her life be determined by tired collagens or by a shortage of zinc which weakens her electromagnetic field, the matrix of life? The goal of life is living. Life is a field of opportunity, guiding the individual forward along paths created by the meshed forces or objective possibilities as they interweave with a person's own potentialities. And this philosophy of life is now bodied forth in the faces of beautiful women. ("Motherhood
William S. Wilson
I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We take the shit of the world for granted and we exchange stories about how we nevertheless get by. We are impertinent. More than half the stars in the universe are orphan-stars belonging to no constellation. And they give off more light than all the constellation stars.
John Berger
The seeker for perfection must discover in his own life the reflection of the inner light.
Kakuzō Okakura
To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense- the power to enjoy through the eye, and the ear, and the imagination- is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it.
John Van Dyke
I got together with Sylvère because I saw how I could help him get his life together. I'm drawn to you cause I see how you can help me take my life apart...
Chris Kraus
Taoism as the "art of being in the world," for it deals with the present—ourselves. It is in us that God meets with Nature, and yesterday parts from to-morrow. The Present is the moving Infinity, the legitimate sphere of the Relative. Relativity seeks Adjustment; Adjustment is Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Kakuzō Okakura
Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.
Robert Hughes
I have associated myself with failed scientists in order to associate myself with failed irony. ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")
William S. Wilson
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
Robert Hughes
Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.
John Berger
One master defines Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky. Truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites.
Kakuzō Okakura
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
John Ashbery
I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do.But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")
William S. Wilson
When a pebble is thrown into a lake, everything, down to the furthermost depths, moves with it. ... And if, afterwards, everything seems as it was, the level of the lake has none the less been raised by imperceptible, incalculable degree. The old order has been overthrown -- by a pebble.
Théophile Thoré
A kitten is the delight of a household. All day long a comedy is played out by an incomparable actor.
Champfleury
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
John Berger
Occult Theft,--Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly,--corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists
John Ruskin
Oh say can you see Alma. The darlingof Them. All her friends were artists.They alone have memories. They alonelove flowers. They alone give partiesand die. Poor Alma. They alone.She died,and it was as if all the jewels in the worldhad heaved a sigh. The seismographat Fordham university registered, for once,a spiritual note. How like a sliverin her own short fat muscular foot.She loved the Western World, thoughthere are some who say she isn't really dead.
Frank O'Hara
Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.
John Ruskin
When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
Robert Hughes
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and what it saw in a plain way. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion--all in one.
John Ruskin
But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, hope works differently. Hope is then something to bite on, to put between the teeth. Don't forget this. Be a realist. With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes strength, when necessary, to choose not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl. A person, with hope between her or his teeth, is a brother or sister who commands respect.
John Berger
Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It’s the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. “We are too ego-centered,” Suzuki tells Cage. “The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.”Adolescent love gives us the first chance to break the shell. Sexual love makes the ego lose itself in the object it loves. “When the ego-shell is broken and the ‘other’ is taken into its own body, we can say that the ego has denied itself or that the ego has taken its first steps towards the infinite.…The religious consciousness is now fully awakened, and all the possible ways of escaping from the struggle or bringing it to an end are most earnestly sought in every direction. Books are read, lectures are attended, sermons are greedily taken in, and various religious exercises or disciplines are tried.”Suzuki says that sexual love is a vehicle of liberation? A crack in the ego shell? A path to the infinite?At this point, if I were Cage, I would buy the book and take it home.
Kay Larson
And there above all of these shops hung a blood soaked sign: a red hand, the hand of a child that was neither male nor female and yet roused feelings of the most dejected and criminal love
Georges Limbour
How can one be so serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous?
Kakuzō Okakura
The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.
Robert Hughes
To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed unmanly, and therefore we think that to love light and find knowledge must always be right. Yet wherever pride has any share in the work, even knowledge and light may be ill pursued. Knowledge is good, and light is good: yet man perished in seeking knowledge, and moths perish in seeking light; and if we, who are crushed before the moth, will not accept such mystery as is needful to us, we shall perish in like manner.
John Ruskin
I am moved by the multitudes of your intelligence and sometimes, returning, I become the sea— in love with your speed, your heaviness and breath.
Frank O'Hara
You bad birds,But God shall not punish you, youShall be with us in heaven, though lessConscious of your happiness, perhaps, than we.Hell is a not quite satisfactory heaven, probably,But you are the fruit and jewelsOf my arrangement . . .
John Ashbery
Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
Robert Hughes
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.
John Berger
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
John Berger
[Tea-masters] have given emphasis to our natural love of simplicity, and shown us the beauty of humility. In fact, through their teachings tea has entered the life of the people.
Kakuzō Okakura
...evolution propels itself by an inclination toward its next probable achievement." ("Desire")
William S. Wilson
Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.
Denis Diderot
I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.
Clive Bell
And whether consciously or not, you must be in many a heart enthroned: queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter of womanhood.
John Ruskin
...But it is also told that Niuka forgot to fill two tiny crevices in the blue firmament. Thus began the dualism of love--two souls rolling through space and never at rest until they join together to complete the universe. Everyone has to build anew his sky of hope and peace.
Kakuzō Okakura
Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
John Berger
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
John Berger