22 quotes found
“Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre”
“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.”
“that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.”
“Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.”
“Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.”
“Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public”
“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 belie...”
“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 scu...”
“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then ...”
“What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in ...”
“What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?”
“In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture...”
“Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting a...”
“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation p”
“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 la...”
“In one sense, (Duchamp's) The Large Glass is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.”
“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 ...”
“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...”
“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 ...”
“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.”
