Quotes by Art Critics - Page 5

[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
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
An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.
Lucy R. Lippard
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
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
Robert Hughes
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
John Berger
The seeker for perfection must discover in his own life the reflection of the inner light.
Kakuzō Okakura
Desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy - a claustrophobia inside your skin -.
Chris Kraus
People stop thinking when they cease to read.
Denis Diderot
We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.
John Berger
We all do things in a certain individual way, according to our temperaments. Every human act — no matter how large or how small— is a direct expression of a man's personality, and bears the inevitable impress of his nature.
S.S. Van Dine
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
...evolution propels itself by an inclination toward its next probable achievement." ("Desire")
William S. Wilson
...The efficacy of psychedelics with regard to art has to do with their ability to render language weightless, as fluid and ephemeral as those famous "bubble letters" of the sixties. Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both the signifier and the signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world - simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it. In my own experience, it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before - thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it. And it is into this abyss that the horror vacui of psychedelic art deploys itself like an incandescent bridge. Because it is one thing to believe, on theoretical evidence, that we live in a prison-house of language. It is quite another to know it, to actually peek into the slippery emptiness as the Bastille explodes around you. Yet psychedelic art takes this apparent occasion for despair and celebrates our escape from linguistic control by flowing out, filling that rippling void with meaningful light, laughter, and a gorgeous profusion.
Dave Hickey
Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.
John Berger
One of the major obstacles impeding any positive future change in our lives is that we are too busy with our current work or activity. Levi quit his tax-work, Peter stopped fishing at lake, Paul ceased being a priest. They all left their jobs because they thought it was necessary.
John Ruskin
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
John Ashbery
Better, perhaps, to dress like a whore around the clock and thus achieve a fully integrated personality.
Chris Kraus
Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.
Denis Diderot
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
John Berger
Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.
Kakuzō Okakura
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
Am I on my way toward that light? Are we always on our way toward the light like a shining blinding opening out of time and darkness? I ask myself as I walk on. I don't know where these words come from, because I'm not aware that I've ever had such thoughts before or that I've inherited such words. Is that what it's all about? Always under way? Always alone? Under way from this group in the half darkness, from these beings who will always follow us, never completely pale around us, no matter where we are, but who can be found around us in those closest to us, in those we meet, even if we travel across the sea...
Ole Sarvig
When the form's in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.
Chris Kraus
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 into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
Robert Hughes
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
...to understand infatuation, how the loved person can become a holding pattern for all the tattered ends of memory, experience and thought you've ever had.
Chris Kraus
Endurance is nobler than strength and patience than beauty.
John Ruskin
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin
The sky sinks slowly inside the past.
Barbara Guest
Think, speak, and act. With age comes self-reproach: I might have done more. Therefore now do!
Théophile Thoré
Isn't it better to have men be ungrateful than to miss a chance to do good?
Denis Diderot
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
In the liquid amber within the ivory porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.
Kakuzō Okakura
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
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
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
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
Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!
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
If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.
Denis Diderot
Is there a way," she wrote in closing, "to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?
Chris Kraus
Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.
Dave Hickey
Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rape followed by gratitude.
Robert Hughes
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
Sunshine is delicious rain is refreshing wind braces us snow is exhilarating there is no such thing as bad weather only different kinds of good weather.
John Ruskin
Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same?
Kakuzō Okakura
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
John Ruskin
As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.
Chris Kraus
You speak of the hand of Fatma, my friends, but you do not know the terrible power of this hand, the hand of monsters that menace you and seduce you with their subterranean access, their metallic splintering, their inhuman grotesqueness of idols.
Georges Limbour
All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.
John Ruskin
Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.
Kakuzō Okakura
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
All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.
John Ruskin
In its confounding of the logic that maintains terms like high and low, or base and sacred as polar opposites, it is this play of the contradictory that allows one to think the truth that Bataille never tired of demonstrating: that violence has historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred; that to be genuine, the very thought of the creative must simultaneously be an experience of death; and that it is impossible for any moment of true intensity to exist apart from a cruelty that is equally extreme.
Rosalind E. Krauss
Sunshine is delicious rain is refreshing wind braces us up snow is exhilarating there is really no such thing as bad weather only different kinds of good weather.
John Ruskin
Oh Dick, you eroticise what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.
Chris Kraus
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
John Berger
If a book is worth reading it is worth buying.
John Ruskin
God gives us always strength enough and sense enough for everything He wants us to do.
John Ruskin