Quotes by Art Critics - Page 5

until only infinity remained of beauty
John Ashbery
You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
John Ruskin
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.
John Ruskin
What to do with daughters has always been something of a problem, unless they are so pretty or so passive or so wealthy that they are snatched up as brides as soon as the come of marriageable age.— THE COLLECTORS: DR. CLARIBEL AND MISS ETTA CONE
Barbara Pollack
Dear Dick, I'm not sure I still want to fuck you. At least, not in the same way. Sylvère keeps talking about us disturbing your "fragility", but I'm not sure that I agree. There's nothing so remarkable in one more woman adoring you. It's a "problem" you're confronting all the time. I'm just a particularly annoying one, one who refuses to behave... And yet I feel this tenderness towards you, after all we've been through.
Chris Kraus
All acts of sex were forms of degradation.... What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she's read)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman femme?
Chris Kraus
It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women are supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos.
Chris Kraus
Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons why.... Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.
Chris Kraus
I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.
Edmond de Goncourt
Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public
Robert Hughes
...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.
Dave Hickey
It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.
Robert Hughes
It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.
Robert Hughes
The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.
John Berger
It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing youbought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. Thecommon law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting alot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is wellto add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you willhave enough to pay for something better.
John Ruskin
you know we've all sinned a lot against scienceso we really ought to be as available as an appleon a boughpleasant thought fresh air free love cross-pollenizationoh oh god how I'd love to dream let alone sleep
Frank O'Hara
Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.
Kakuzō Okakura
People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly.
Kakuzō Okakura
Andalways embrace things, people earthsky stars, as I do, freely and withthe appropriate sense of space.
Frank O'Hara
We are ever brutal to those who love and serve us in silence, but the time may come when, for our cruelty, we shall be deserted by these best friends of ours.
Kakuzō Okakura
Nothing is more hallowing than the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting, the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity... Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art becomes akin to religion and ennobles mankind. It is this which makes a masterpiece something sacred.
Kakuzō Okakura
All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.
John Ruskin
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
John Berger
If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses
John Ruskin
If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses
John Ruskin
For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.
Robert Hughes
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
John Ashbery
You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained.
Denis Diderot
There is no wealth but life.
John Ruskin
S: But Chris, I think his embarrassment isn't in relation to you or me but to himself. What can he do?C: I hate being thrown into such a physical state.S: Isn't that experiencing life to the hilt?C: No, it's just a dumb infatuation. I'm so ashamed.S: But even if his silence hurts you, isn't that what attracted you to him? The fact that he was inaccessible. So, I think there is a contradiction there, at least nothing to feel ashamed of -.
Chris Kraus
[Being rejected] hurt, 'cause what turned me on in sex was believing that they knew me, that I'd found somebody to understand.
Chris Kraus
No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.
Chris Kraus
Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.
John Ruskin
the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,—not the first thought that comes, so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,—not the first passion that comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, the treacherous; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true passion left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined.
John Ruskin
Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless wholeLike some pocket history of the world, so generalAs to constitute a sob or wail
John Ashbery
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
John Berger
When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words:'Mr. Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?''I am sorry... I fear not.''You see where you are now!
Charles S. Ricketts
If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.
Edmond de Goncourt
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot
To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
John Ruskin
You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
William S. Wilson
...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
William S. Wilson
Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
William S. Wilson
All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.
Denis Diderot
There is of course a deep spiritual need which the pilgrimage seems to satisfy, particularly for those hardy enough to tackle the journey on foot.
Edwin Mullins
A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probablythere too, and bore witness as only rodents can.
John Ashbery
The faster you go, the idler you get.
Ferreira Gullar
I'm heading for a clean-named placelike Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get therewithout help and nosy proclivities.
John Ashbery
The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …
John Ashbery
I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days!
Frank O'Hara
I have been to lots of partiesand acted perfectly disgracefulbut I never actually collapsedoh Lana Turner we love you get up
Frank O'Hara
Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.
Frank O'Hara
You just go on your nerve.
Frank O'Hara
...but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it...
Frank O'Hara
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!
Frank O'Hara
My HeartI'm not going to cry all the timenor shall I laugh all the time,I don't prefer one "strain" to another.I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,not just a sleeper, but also the big,overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,often. I want my feet to be bare,I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, butthe better part of it, my poetry, is open.
Frank O'Hara
That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.
Frank O'Hara
I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.
Frank O'Hara
Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac
Frank O'Hara
I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my versesand my heart is closinglike a fist.
Frank O'Hara