“If we define art as part of the realm of experience, we can assume that after a viewer looks at a piece, he “leaves” with the art, because the “art” has been experienced. We are dealing with the limits of experience---not for instance with the limits of painting. We have chosen that experience out the realm of experience to be defined as “art” because having this label it is given special attention. Perhaps this all “Art” means---this Frame of Mind. The object of art may be to seek the elimination of the necessity of it.” -Robert Irwin/James Turrell/Dr. Ed Wortz
"BEING PROFOUND AND SEEMING PROFOUND -- Those who know they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see the bottom of something it must be profound. It is timid and dislikes going into the water." -F.Nietzsche
"Avoid three kinds of Master: Those who esteem only themselves, For their esteem is blindness; Those who esteem only innovations, For their opinions are aimless, Without meaning; Those who esteem only what is established; Their minds Are little cells of ice." -Ibn Abbad
"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it." -John Fowles
"Lack of meaning is life's sole hope. How inconsiderate are those who would force one upon it!" -Christopher Spranger
"...the photo is the worked recording of a physical impact ...the digital image, for its part, results not from the movement of a body, but from a calculation." -Pierre Levy
"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." - Aldous Huxley
"Photography is the product of complete alienation." -Marcel Proust
"...we regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman." -Ludwig Wittenstein
"If I am not moved by the sight of a glass of water mounted on a gallery wall, or a small animal fashioned out of carpet fluff, is that because I have failed to understand it? Or could it be that the artist has failed to communicate with me?" -Alice O'Keeffe
"Why should academic terminology be the default vehicle for discussing art? Why is there such an emphasis on newness, schism and radicality? Even when the art itself may be enjoyably throwaway, language pins it to deathlessly auratic registers of exchange. This suggests a subliminal fear that, if the subject in question is not talked up as Big and Culturally Significant, then the point of fussing over it in the first place might be called into question, bringing the whole house of cards tumbling down." -Dan Fox
"There is no such thing as a true portrait. They are all delusions..." -Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Art is a game between all people of all periods.” -Marcel Duchamp
"The best image of what I am is how I am behaving. The two are as closely bound to each other as a word with its meaning. These public criteria provide us with a case against those for whom happiness or well-being is not a practical condition but an individual state of mind. But happiness is not just a state of mind, any more than playing chess is just a state of mind. People may feel content with their situation; but if they are not, for example, allowed to play an active role in determining their own lives, then..they cannot be genuinely fulfilled...slaves may feel in good shape from time to time, they are not excactly object-lessons in how to excel at being human. If they were, we would not bother to free them. Objectivity is among other things a political affair: it is a matter of there always being ways of refuting those who insist that all is well as long as we are feeling fine...There is, however, an even deeper relation between objectivity and ethics. Objectivity can mean a selfless openess to the needs of others, one which lies very close to love. It is not the opposite of personal interests and convictions, but of egoism. To try to see the other's situation as it really is is an essential condition of caring for them. That is not to say that there is ever only one way a situation can be said to be. The point...is that genuinely caring for someone is not what gets in the way of seeing their situation for what it is, but what makes it possible...To acheive such objectivity in an absolute way we would need to remove ourselves from the situation altogether, which would hardly be the most convenient way of intervening in it." -Terry Eagleton
"The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate. Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and “leftist” professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called “the manipulative character.” The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager." -Christopher Hedges
"All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone." -Blaise Pascal
"Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out." -Carl Sagan
"The view...our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images-might be called the conservative critique of the diffusion of such images. I call this argument conservative because it is the 'sense' of reality that is eroded. There is still a reality that exists independent of the attempts to weaken its authority. The argument is in fact a defense of reality and the imperiled standards for responding more fully to it. In the more radical-cynical-spin of this critique there is nothing to defend: the vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images. According to a highly influential analysis, we live in a "society of a spectacle." Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real-that is, interesting-to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has been abdicated. There are only representations: media. ...Reports of the death of reality- like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature-seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture. To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breath-taking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in a rich part of the world, where news is converted into entertainment-that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of "the modern", a prerequisite for dismantling forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality."
-Susan Sontag
"An object that tells of loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak for itself. Tells of others. Will it include them?" -Jasper Johns
"Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo." -Karl Marx
"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." -The Dhammapada
"The media have subsituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover the older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it." -Marshall McLuhan
"I intensely dislike any reference to supernaturalism. But I think there can be profound mystical feelings which do not have to call on fictitious agencies like angels and demons and deities. The whole natural world is bathed in wonder and beauty and mystery. The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological and is conveyed very powerfully in music." - Oliver Sacks
|
|