Art

"We shall never be able to do justice to Indian art, for ignorance and fanaticism have destroyed its greatest achievements, and have half ruined the rest. At Elephanta the Portuguese certified their piety by smashing statuary and bas-reliefs in unrestrained barbarity; and almost everywhere in the north the Moslems brought to the ground those triumphs of Indian architecture, of the fifth and sixth centuries, which tradition ranks as far superior to the later works that arouse our wonder and admiration today. The Moslems decapitated statues, and tore them limb from limb; they appropriated for their mosques, and in great measure imitated, the graceful pillars of the Jain temples. Time and fanaticism joined in the destruction, for the orthodox Hindus abandoned and neglected temples that had been profaned by the touch of alien hands."

"We may guess at the lost grandeur of north Indian architecture by the powerful edifices that still survive in the south, where Moslem rule entered only in minor degree, and after some habituation to India had softened Mohammedan hatred of Hindu ways. Further, the great age of temple architecture in the south came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after Akbar had tamed the Moslems and taught them some appreciation of Indian art. Consequently the south is rich in temples, usually superior to those that remain standing in the north, and more massive and impressive; Fergusson counted some thirty "Dravidian" or southern temples any one of which, in his estimate, must have cost as much as an English cathedral."

"But we cannot judge these works in their original form from what survives of them today; and doubtless there are clues to their appreciation that are not revealed to alien souls. Even the Occidental, however, can admire the nobility of the subject, the majestic scope of the plan, the unity of the composition, the clearness, simplicity and decisiveness of the line, and among many details the astonishing perfection of that bane of all artists, the hands. Imagination can picture the artist-priest who prayed in these cells and perhaps painted these walls and ceilings with fond and pious art while Europe lay buried in her early-medieval darkness. Here at Ajanta religious devotion fused architecture, sculpture and painting into a happy unity, and produced one of the sovereign monuments of Hindu art."

"To judge of the past from the present, let us take the English nation in India. It has held India for a longer period than the Greeks did Bactria from the time of Alexander to that of As'oka, but yet it has produced no appreciable effect on the architecture of its neighbours. The Bhutanese and the Sikimites have not yet borrowed a single English moulding. The Nepalese, under the administration of Sir Jung Bahadur, are not a whit behind-hand of As ́oka and his people; Sir Jung went to Europe, which As'oka never did; still there is no change perceptible in Nepalese architecture indicative of a European amalgamation. The Kashmiris and the Afghans have proved equally conservative, and so have the Burmese. But to turn from their neighbours to the people of Hindustan : these have had intimate intercourse with Europeans now for over three hundred years, and enjoyed the blessings of English rule for over a century, and yet they have not produced a single temple built in the Saxon, or any other European style. Thus the conclusion we are called upon to accept is that what has not been accomplished by the intimate intercourse of three centuries, and the absolute sovereignty of a century, in these days of railways, and electric telegraphs, and mass education, was effected by the Greeks two thousand years ago simply by living as distant neighbours for eighty years or so."

"Aurangzeb was a misfortune for Mogul and Indian art. Dedicated fanatically to an exclusive religion, he saw in art nothing but idolatry and vanity. Already Shah Jehan had prohibited the erection of Hindu temples;127 Aurangzeb not only continued the ban, but gave so economical a support to Moslem building that it, too, languished under his reign. Indian art followed him to the grave."

"Before Indian art, as before every phase of Indian civilization, we stand in humble wonder at its age and its continuity."

"Sages such as Sri Aurobindo who have meditated on Hindu iconography, and savants such as Ananda Coomara-swamy, Stella Kramrisch, and Alice Boner who have studied the subject, assure us that the forms and features of Hindu icons have a source higher than the normal reaches of the human mind. The icons are no photocopies of any human or animal forms as we find them in their physical frames. They are in fact crystallizations of the abstract into the concrete, of the infinite into the finite. They always point beyond themselves, and a contemplation of them always draws us from the outer to the inner.Hindu Šilpašãstras lay down not only technical formulas for carving holy icons in stone, and metal, and other materials. They also lay down elaborate rules about how the artist is to fast, and pray, and otherwise purify himself for long periods before he is permitted, if at all, to have a psychic image of the God or Goddess whom he wants to incarnate in a physical form. It is this sublime source of the Šilpašãstras which alone can explain a Sarnath Buddha, or a Chidambram NaTarãja, or a Vidisha Varãha, to name only a few of the large assembly of divine images inhabiting the earth. It is because this sublime source is not accessible to modern sculptors that we have to be content with poor copies which look like parodies of the original marvels."

"In my youth I hoped for no higher status in life than to be among those who would follow in the wake of Thomas Nast, Joseph Keppler, and Bernard Gillam, outstanding artists in the field of political caricature. And when in my early twenties I grew familiar with the political and social satires of the graphic artists of England and France across two centuries, these gave even greater stimulus to my ambition. Dreamily I anticipated that my destiny was to succeed as a caricaturist of some influence in public affairs."

"The self-righteously bitter cartoons that appear in sectarian magazines are fine if all you want to do is preach to the choir, but I believe you can reach a lot more people with humor."

"I was in deadly earnest about developing my talent, and carousing had no lure for me. I applied myself assiduously to the work in hand, and as I proceeded I became more and more convinced that graphic art was my road to recognition. Painting interested me no less, but I thought of it as having no influence. If one painted a portrait, or a landscape, or whatever, for a rich man to own in his private gallery, what was the use? On the other hand, a cartoon could be reproduced by simple mechanical processes and easily made accessible to hundreds of thousands. I wanted a large audience."

"Cartoons are a great medium for demonstrating just how absurd something is, without ever having to say it directly."

"The thing I like most about political cartooning is the relevance of the work to the real world. And if you do this long enough you get to look back and see yourself in historical context, sometimes on the right side and sometimes on the wrong. But I’m proud of the work I was doing in the runup that bamboozled us into the Iraq War and that horrible chapter where Cheney and Bush drove the country into the ditch, the one we’re still in."

"I cartoon because I got tired of feeling excluded from the comic stage...We’re not here to fix the world’s problems but to shine a big, fat light on them hopefully."

"It’s what we do as cartoonists, to cut through the [bull] and expose it."

"my slogan is “The Pen is Funnier than the Sword”—which I really believe. I’m committed to non-violent change."

"Political cartoons and other graphic images had depicted the possible social catastrophes surrounding female advancement since before te creation of the United States (Franzen and Ethiel), Woman Suffrage , for instance, held a multitude of possible horrors: usually, cartoons depicted a woman in a tie, smoking a (Freudian) cigar and dominating a man, often her husband. In this logic, a woman with the masculine prerogative of the vote would naturally become masculinized, wearing pants and sitting in indelicate poses. If women became masculine the equal and opposite reaction was that men would then become feminine, adopting female duties and behaviors like childcare and homemaking. The cartoons depicting and negotiating these fears addressed social apradigms about women's roles, about masculinity and feminimity and they set an historical precedent in graphic are for later representations of women."

"I’m an idealist and an optimist: all my political work is aimed at helping usher in a better world. I believe that political cartooning should be almost a form of activism, not just idle commentary for the sake of commentary."

"Throughout my my career – which began in 1990 right when the press became unionized – the themes have generally been social-political issues: police brutality, state terrorism, corruption, political maneuvers…And not just in Brazil, the themes I tackle looking abroad include war, armed conflicts, and torture. I’ve also done a lot about the Brazilian military dictatorship."

"As a political cartoonist, wielded more influence than any other artist of the 19th century. He not only enthralled a vast audience with boldness and wit, but swayed it time and again to his personal position on the strength of his visual imagination. Both Lincoln and Grant acknowledged his effectiveness in their behalf, and as a crusading civil reformer he helped destroy the corrupt Tweed Ring that swindled New York City of millions of dollars. Indeed, his impact on American public life was formidable enough to profoundly affect the outcome of every presidential election during the period 1864 to 1884."

"What would a respectful political cartoon look like?"

"There are many taboos, intolerance and extremism. And our task is — to destroy them. I believe that clever and artistic, reasoned and convincing humor can push more and more walls in our world. And it can be done without insult or aggression."

"Few people have any adequate conception of the cartoon as a factor in political agitation and social progress...A score of pages of the most graphic writing could not be so effective...It is one of the most subtle of educational forces. Its evolution has been slow under capitalism, but is being rapidly accelerated with the growth of Socialism. The true art of the untrammelled cartoonist is now being developed and he will be one of the most inspiring factors in the propaganda of the revolution. No more is the cartoonist compelled to prostitute his genius and traffic in his art. The prizes of capitalism no longer tempt him; its chains of dependence no longer hold him captive...[the social cartoonist] is the social conscience, the social sense of duty, the social love and the social inspiration, and his the thrillingly joyous and self-imposed task to redeem the art of pictorial appeal from gross and sordid commercialism and consecrate it to the cause of freedom and the service of humanity."

"I, for one, think good political cartoons retain their value for decades. You can learn a lot from those old Doonesbury books. I might add that we cartoonists who lambasted the Bush administration from the beginning have been proven more accurate than most of the highly-paid gasbags you see on television. Historians and television producers, please take note."

"Some of the physical phenomena commonly simulated in movie and video game special effects include water, fire, smoke, explosions, rigid body dynamics, and the deformation of elastic bodies. The governing equations for these processes are most often in the form of a system of partial differential equations."

"Any kid with a computer can reproduce the special effects seen in today’s movies. The mystery's gone. The curiosity that viewers once felt when they saw special effects has disappeared. It's as if a magician had revealed all of his tricks... There’s no question that these computer films are well packaged but the charm has disappeared... If Spielberg were to film E.T. today using the latest technology I'm not sure it would be a hit because the techniques they’re using at the moment couldn't reproduce the tender expression of ET's eyes, for example. The secret of creating what technology is unable to express lies in the work of the artisan, who is able to develop characteristics that touch our deepest emotions."

"Now, almost no major-studio movie is made without CGI—even Oscar-baiting dramas like Social Network, or comedies like The Campaign and the coming The Hangover Part III. Trailers now have more CG shots than all of Terminator 2. Budgets have swelled into the hundreds of millions. Of course, this has led to a lot of bad films getting made. And special effects have become so pervasive, they've lost much of their capacity to cause wonder. Today, it's nearly as common for audience to pan a film's effects (like those in I Am Legend, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Green Lantern and even King Kong's dinosaurs) as it is for them to praise it: We've gotten so used to CGI that the illusion, the sense of realness that pervaded Jurassic Park, is dead."

"Jurassic Park's revolution was technological, but more importantly, it was popular. If Spielberg and Lucas saw the future of cinema in those shots, it was the public who made that future a reality. Sam Neill and Laura Dern's stunned awe upon seeing a real-looking brachiosaur on its hind legs eating from a tree was a perfect mirror of our own. Audiences believed. When that dinosaur's feet came down with a thud, the reverberations rippled past dumbstruck viewers and into moviemaking itself. Two years later, the world witnessed the first CG character in a main role (Casper), more realistic CG-rendered animals (Jumanji), and the first feature-length computer-animated movie (Toy Story). Between 1996 and 1998 special effects films started to create entire cities, armies of creatures and destructive disasters in films like Dragonheart, Independence Day, Twister, Mars Attacks, The Fifth Element, Starship Troopers, Titanic, and Godzilla. It was an exciting time to witness how far CGI's capabilities could be pushed. By 1999—when The Mummy, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and The Matrix contributed their own technological forward leaps—computer-generated effects weren't assistive moviemaking tools anymore. They were the driving force of entire films."

"The temptations and pitfalls are to go too far -- to exaggerate too much and just put things on the screen because you can put them in. To me, the most important thing is the characterization: to know them, to understand them and appreciate them. The effects are just to allow you to depict the characters as WELL and vividly as possible."

"Q: Much of your work involves faces. Which seems ironic, because faces are the hardest things to fake with CGI. Avatar got it right, and then Tron: Legacy got it wrong a year later. Do you think there will be work for practical effects and makeup people doing facial design for CGI films?"

"My very first day, we were doing a huge practical effect, a flying effect. It was going to be me and Gene Hackman. Okay, first of all, that’s incredibly cool. But we were in a ’30s-style open-top roadster and, basically, Superman—played by Christopher Reeve, also amazingly cool—flies underneath the car, and he would fly away with it. Nowadays they would do that with green screen. You’d be lucky if you ever actually even got in the car. But at the time, they did it practical. So they literally got one of those huge construction cranes that are usually on the top of buildings, and lifted this convertible 40, 50 feet in the air, with Christopher Reeve wired underneath it in full Superman outfit. Did I say “outfit”? I’m apparently from the 1950s. [Laughs.]"

"One of the fatal mistakes that almost every science-fiction film makes is that they spend so much time on the settings — you know, creating the environment — that they spend film time on it. And you don't have to spend too much film time to create an environment. What they're doing is showing off the amount of work that they generated, and it slows the pace of the film down. And the story is not the settings. The story is the stories, plot. You're always surprised with characters, I mean in film it's even more dramatic than it is in writing, because eventually you actually take a real person and stick them into that character. And that real person brings with him, or her, an enormous package of reality. I mean, Threepio is just a hunk of plastic, and without Tony Daniels in there it just isn't anything at all. In the first film we had maybe 20 colors to paint with, and this time we've had 40 colors to paint with. Well, that doesn't mean it's going to be a better painting. Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an end to themselves. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing."

"In any other job in the world, if you wasted all your time fucking around and didn’t get any work done, you’d get fired. Writer’s Block is a filthy lie. I couldn’t have Accountant’s Block. Oh, woe is me, I can’t make these spreadsheets because I’m just not feeling it today—FIRED."

"He had writer's block once. It was the worst ten minutes of his life."

"I’ve realized over the years that, with rare exceptions, most writer’s block isn’t writer’s block at all: It’s necessary time that allows the unconscious mind to do its deep work. The great “Ah-Ha!” moments don’t usually come at the keyboard. They come when I’m lying on the floor, staring into space (or banging my head against the wall in frustration). All of a sudden the Unconscious Camera turns on, a movie starts playing in my head-and there it is: The Big Moment. Or the Whole Damn Story. And, in many ways, I had nothing whatsoever to do with it."

"The imagination only becomes becalmed if and when your tale has sailed you into lifeless waters, and you are too stubborn to throw pages away and start over. If your imagination is going into rebellion against you, start throwing pages of the manuscript away, starting with the most recent and moving backward. At a certain point, you will discover the writing block has vanished. Writer's block is your muse's way of telling you that your tale is going wrong. Listen to the muse and try a different approach."

"In this mean work of detraction, we scarcely need say that the miserable dough-face who edits the Cass paper in this city, and through whom our daughter was basely excluded from "Seward Seminary," on account of her complexion, very appropriately took the lead. This self-elected umpire of taste in the city of Rochester, claims as much skill in matters relating to the harmony of sounds, as he assumes with respect to the harmony of colors. We warn the good people of Rochester against attending either seminaries or concerts, on pain of being expelled from respectable and refined society, should they venture to do so before obtaining the opinion of this "most learned judge" whose word is sufficient to set at defiance and veto the wishes of a whole seminary of young ladies and misses. We believe he does not object to the "Virginia Minstrels," "Christy's Minstrels," the "Ethiopian Serenaders," or any of the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens. Those performers are undoubtedly in harmony with his refined and elegant taste!"

"[to Lois Cummings] Y'know, I-I-I just—I'm just thinking about just how lucky we are to have a kid, y'know? I mean, I, it's, just take it for granted, but, it's a miracle when you think about it. Idn't it, y'know? This, this whole, this-this "birth" thing. Like, I mean, y'know, wha-what happens? I unload, uh-uh-uh—a whole batch of this—these, uh, these little reproductive apostrophes in-in-into your, uh, y'know, uh-uh-uh "miracle bucket," and then, nine months later, Milt comes out, y'know? I mean, it's-it's—it's-it's-uh, for me, it's got the same kind of, uh, uh, y'know, awe-inspiring mystique as-as-as, like, Shrinky Dinks."

"Whiteface (performance)-->"

"To test her idea, she [Michelle Khine] whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal."

"List of blackface minstrel troupes"

"List of entertainers known to have performed in blackface"

"Portrayal of East Asians in Hollywood"

"Censored Eleven"

"Border Morris"

"Little Black Sambo"

"List of blackface minstrel songs"

"Racebending"

"Partly from a love of music, and partly from curiosity to see persons of color exaggerating the peculiarities of their race, we were induced last evening to hear these Serenaders. The Company is said to be composed entirely of colored people, and it may be so. We observed, however, that they too had recourse to the burnt cork and lamp black, the better to express their characters and to produce uniformity of complexion. Their lips, too, were evidently painted, and otherwise exaggerated. Their singing generally was but an imitation of white performers, and not even a tolerable representation of the character of colored people. Their attempts at wit showed them to possess a plentiful lack of it, and gave their audience a very low idea of the shrewdness and sharpness of the race to which they belong. With two or three exceptions, they were a poor set, and will make themselves ridiculous wherever they go. We heard but one really fine voice among the whole, and that was Cooper's, who is truly an excellent singer; and a company possessing equal ability with himself, would no doubt, be very successful in commanding the respect and patronage of the public generally. Davis (the Bones) too, is certainly a master player; but the Tambourine was an utter failure. B. Richardson is an extraordinary character. His Virginia Breakdown excelled anything which we have ever seen of that description of dancing. He is certainly far before the dancer in the Company of the Campbells. We are not sure that our readers will approve of our mention of those persons, so strong must be their dislike of everything that seems to feed the flame of American prejudice against colored people; and in this they may be right, but we think otherwise. It is something gained when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience; and we think that even this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race. But they must cease to exaggerate the exaggerations of our enemies; and represent the colored man rather as he is, than as Ethiopian Minstrels usually represent him to be. They will then command the respect of both races; whereas now they only shock the taste of the one, and provoke the disgust of the other. Let Cooper, Davis and Richardson bring around themselves persons of equal skill, and seek to improve, relying more upon the refinement of the public, than its vulgarity; let them strive to conform to it, rather than to cater to the lower elements of the baser sort, and they may do much to elevate themselves and their race in popular estimation."

"Blackface is a form of cross-dressing, in which one puts on the insignias of a sex, class, or race that stands in binary opposition to one's own. Current attention to cross-dressing, however, derives from gender and not racial studies. There are good theoretical reasons to privilege sexual over racial cross-dressing, since the construction of sexual difference is a universal feature of culture. Sexual and racial cross-dressing may not do the same work, a possibility that problematizes the use of gender cross-dressing theory to answer the question raised by race. But where the prevailing historical cross-dressing practice has been grounded on race, then the theory must do justice to the resulting sexuoracial system."

"Mac: A lot of great actors have done blackface."