Art Critics

"Although the assassination at Sarajevo was certainly the crucial precedent of the European war that its conspirators had sought, it was not the historical cause. ... The implication is that the war was, if not inevitable, at least impending, so that the assassination acted as a lever, prying the various powers into predictable paths."

"At the Paris Exhibition, the Soviet pavilion and the Italian Futurist section represented the cutting edge of artistic avant-garde. It featured the architectural concepts and theater decoration and set designs of Enrico Prampolini and Giacomo Balla, and the panels of Fortunato Depero, with their vivid colors, embroidered figures, and cloth superimposed on cloth, perfectly executed and of the finest taste, with a stylized composition that was schematic and sometimes caricatural. Some of his painted wooden puppets also attest to his inventiveness, with their summary volumes and search for curious and effective rhythms, often with happy results."

"Religious art Is the blossom of religious dogma, and is its pictorial exponent. It is no more possible to have a religious art without dogmas, than to have a religious worship without faith. From this faith In a revealed dogma, will spring, with more or less perfection and vigor, every work bearing. In the most remote manner, upon religious events and emotions; and, not from the bare belief, but from the glowing, sanctified inspiration of devout affection, holy desire and adoring faith, have sprung. In every age, those conceptions of heavenly things that appeal to the sympathies of modern as well as of ancient Christendom."

"Ici, elle était vraiment fille; elle obéissait à son tempérament de femme ardente et cruelle; elle vivait, plus raffinée et plus sauvage, plus exécrable et plus exquise; elle réveillait plus énergiquement les sens en léthargie de l’homme, ensorcelait, domptait plus sûrement ses volontés, avec son charme de grande fleur vénérienne, poussée dans des couches sacrilèges, élevée dans des serres impies."

"A mad little maid is Rose Madder, As bad as they make 'em and badder. At her window one night Was the scandalous sight Of a lad and, God help us, a ladder."

"That is why today, an intercultural event around the concept of the limits and excesses of the body can give food for thought on our present."

"I am particularly motivated to promote the work of Tunisian and North African contemporary artists who live in their countries, and don’t have enough international visibility."

"In an Arabo-Islamic country, it is important that artists remind and highlight the importance of the body in the private, social, and cultural life."

"This recent spectacular growth on the number of art students has certainly boosted the interest for art-related events but not necessarily produced more quality artists on the national and international scene yet"

"The institutionalization of the radical ethos in the academy has brought with it not only an increasing politicization of the humanities, but also an increasing ignorance of the humanistic legacy. Instead of reading the great works of the past, students watch movies, pronounce on the depredations of patriarchal society, or peruse second- or third-rate works dear to their ideological cohort; instead of reading widely among primary texts, they absorb abstruse commentaries on commentaries, resorting to primary texts only to furnish illustrations for their pet critical "theory." Since many older professors have themselves been the beneficiaries of the kind of traditional education they have rejected and are denying their students, it is the students who are the real losers in this fiasco."

"[B]ehind the many pseudo-sciences that have recently dominated literary criticism . . . you will find the same suspicion of literature, a desire to sever our relation to it by denuding it of meaning. The "methods" proposed are laughable caricatures of science; and the results delivered are useful to no one. But that was not the point. The methods of the new literary theorist are really weapons of subversion: an attempt to destroy humane education from within, to rupture the chain of sympathy that binds us to our culture. That is why the new schools of criticism have acquired a following: they promise to release us from the burden of study by showing that there is nothing after all to learn."

"[M]eaningful politics must recognize other important values in human life. Indeed, politics makes no sense when it stands by itself. If the question who wields political power is not broadened to take account of what that power is to be used for - that is, what human values it will serve - then it reduces to a matter of who manages to subdue whom."

"The Beats were tremendously significant, but chiefly in the way that they provided a preview in the 1950s of the cultural, intellectual, and moral disasters that would fully flower in the late 1960s. The ideas of the Beats, their sensibility, contained in ovo all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the naive political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come."

"The notion that some works are better and more important than others; that some works exert a special claim on our attention; that "being educated" requires a thoughtful acquaintance with these works and an ability to discriminate between greater and lesser-all this is anathema to the forces arrayed against the traditional understanding of the humanities. The very idea that the works of Shakespeare (for example) might be indisputably greater than the collected cartoons of Bugs Bunny is often rejected as "antidemocratic" and "elitist," an imposition on the freedom and political interests of various groups."

"The institutionalization of the Beat ethic has been a moral, aesthetic, and intellectual disaster of the first order. (It has also been a disaster for fashion and manners, but that is a separate subject.) We owe to the 1960s the ultimate institutionalization of immoralist radicalism: the institutionalization of drugs, pseudo-spirituality, promiscuous sex, virulent anti-Americanism, naive anti-capitalism, and the precipitous decline of artistic and intellectual standards. But the1960s and 1970s only codified and extended into the middle class the radical spirit of the Beats, who, in more normal times, would have remained what they were in the beginning; members of a fringe movement that provided stand-up comics with material."

"The Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?"

"Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that 'liberated them from all restraints' and allowed them to experience every impulse as a 'divine command'. What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they 'conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities'. Podhoretz added, 'It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life'. Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an 'expanded consciousness', the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery."

""History,” Bagehot wrote, “is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”"

"The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions."

"Some people regard the astonishing collapse of manners and civility in our society as a superficial event. They are wrong. The fate of decorum expresses the fate of a culture’s dignity, its attitude toward its animating values."

"Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, 'We'll get you through your children!' For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true."

"The Beats, like their successors in the Sixties, have often been described as 'idealists'. But fantasies of total gratification are not the product of idealism. They arise from a narcissism that, finding the world unequal to its desires, retreats into a realm of heedless self-absorption. Modesty, convention, and self-restraint then appear as the enemies rather than as the allies of humanity. In this sense, the Beat generation marks a step away from civilization."

"As with most revolutions, the counterculture's call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control. The phenomenon of 'political correctness', with its speech codes and other efforts to enforce ideological conformity, was one predictable result of this transformation. What began at the University of California at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement (called by some the 'Filthy Speech Movement'} soon degenerated into an effort to abridge freedom by dictating what could and could not be said about any number of politically sensitive issues."

"You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. In fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence."

"Incidentally, why is it that drug abuse is always described as an 'experiment', as if some important scientific enterprise were at stake instead of hedonistic self-indulgence?"

"The very concept of "ethnocentrism," which is used like a sledge-hammer to disparage the West, is a Western invention."

"If the politicization of art and education represents one large part of the counterculture's legacy, the coarsening of feeling and sensibility is another. No phenomenon has done more to advance this coarsening than rock music. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of rock music to the agenda of the cultural revolution. It is also impossible to overstate its soul-deadening destructiveness. The most reviled part of Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind was his chapter criticizing the effects of rock. But Bloom was right in insisting that rock music is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. The triumph of rock was not only an aesthetic disaster of giant proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive."

"Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank - or to blame."

"And let’s not forget “Dane-Geld”: It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say: “Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away.” And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane."

"What is not possible is to combine the pursuit of pleasure and the enjoyment of comfort with the characteristic pleasures of a strong mind. If you wish for luxury, you must not nourish the inquisitive instinct."

"Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life."

"The Beats are crucial to an understanding of America's cultural revolution not least because in their lives, their proclamations, and (for lack of a more accurate term) their 'work' they anticipated so many of the pathologies of the Sixties and Seventies. Their programmatic anti-Americanism, their avid celebration of drug abuse, their squalid, promiscuous sex lives, their pseudo-spirituality, their attack on rationality and their degradation of intellectual standards, their aggressive narcissism and juvenile political posturing: in all this and more, the Beats were every bit as 'advanced' as any Sixties radical."

"We - the industrialized, technologized world - have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'."

"In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause."

"She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have made her only to give her to others."

"If some people think of establishing an antifascist and stateless Europe, which would be virtually remote-controlled from New York or Tel Aviv, this colonized Europe does not appeal to us at all, and we also believe that such a conception would only prepare the way for communist infiltration and war."

"Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization."

"Baudelaire had supper at the table next to ours. He was without a cravat, his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean. The face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like a knife, and a precise elocution that tries to copy Saint-Just and succeeds."

"We have been living for three years on a falsification of history. This falsification is clever: it leads to imaginations, then relies on the conspiracy of imaginations. [...] It had been a good fortune to discover in 1945 those concentration camps that no one had heard of until then, and which became precisely the proof we needed, the flagrante delicto in its purest form, the crime against humanity that justified everything. [...] The moral war was won. The German monstrosity was proved by these precious documents. [...] And the silence was such, the curtain was so skillfully, so abruptly revealed, that not a single voice dared to say that all this was too good to be perfectly true."

"We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire."

"The single party, the secret police, the public displays of Caesarism, even the presence of a Führer are not necessarily attributes of fascism. […] The famous fascist methods are constantly revised and will continue to be revised. More important than the mechanism is the idea which fascism has created for itself of man and freedom. […] With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn: and paradoxically it will, without doubt, be the last bastion of Freedom and the sweetness of living."

"There is nothing actual and real except nature and poetry. (Il n'y a de positif et de réel que la nature et la poésie.)"

"Biochemical data and experiments confirm that human possibilities – including biological ones – they improve when they get in touch with positive energy and the adrenalin that derives from the best forms of culture. It is a very evident application and it help all sorts of human fulfillment. I think this is the main economic effect the museums give."

"...from my point of view, a very serious, worthy and professional exhibition. It's nice that there is a solid culture of color, ...there is a persistent desire to express their feelings of life, their artistic vision."

"Another important direction in contemporary Russian artists’ books, with many precedents set by the Futurists, is the fusion of poetic and artistic talent of artist-authors blessed with Doppelbegabung. The intimate relationships between text and image is enhanced when author and artist are one and the same person and engage in an inter-art discourse that leads to creations that are truly unified works of art. An artist who achieved equal mastery in more than one medium and made different arts merge in his personality was no doubt Alexey Parygin. His poetic collections <...> represent an attempt to synthesize text and plastic figurative form in books where literary and visual languages are calculated to have a simultaneous effect on the reader/viewer. The work of Alexey Parygin have common features that are not accidental as the books were created at more or less the same time."

"The works create new poetry, which involuntarily rivals with habitual esthetic stereotypes. For instance, we accept as a common notion to worship joyously the classic beauty of Saint Petersburg, its harmony and stately grandeur. This exposition does have variations of that sort. But observe “Night Nevsky” by Parygin. Rough to the touch texture, dark abyss. In the darkness urgent lights explode. They bring forth immediate spiritual angst. One does not regard the regal magnificence of the urban landscape-it is neither cast aside, nor left behind the curtains, as dramatism of modern perception takes over. One regards not a city museum for curious crowds, but one beholds the habitat of our days where we seek, love, fight, suffer. That art defines perception."

"Project "City" by Alexey Parygin and Timofey Markov is sure an example of livre d'artiste with all its classical characteristics from the form (portfolio with impressions) to the choice of participants who mostly see this work as a kind of experiment, just an episode in their artistic work. Inviting new authors to play with the idea of a book is a very positive decision that provides a lot of new ideas. The chosen subject — “urban theme” — connects the project with its prototype, because the city was one of the most popular and actual subjects for collections of printings. Some format restrictions are traditional for such a project: Their size of paper is defined. And the sheet doubled up. Actually, each participant of the project is invited to decorate a page-spread. The difference is in the absence of any literary text. Furthermore, the subject is given abstractedly: Just a city, without any personifications, details, geographical coordinates. It forms a huge field for reflection and gives every artist the maximal freedom to narrate about his personal connections to the city. Thirty-five voices, views, private stories about the city, thirty-five visions and arts to be in and with it. The visual part is completed with the words the artists tell about the city. These sentences are not always connected directly to the printed impressions but they give more volume and depth to them anyway."

"The artist’s book is a territory of an experiment. "City" demonstrates a diversity of methods and a huge spectrum of artistic languages that create the unique atmosphere of this publication. All the common print techniques are used here: etching, lithography, linocut, silkscreen, plywood print and stencil. At the same time every work of art shows the individuality of its creator. Almost all of them were completely made by the authors themselves. In some cases, the help of professional typographers was needed. All the compositions and details were discussed with the art-moderator. That is why it is possible to talk about the synthesis of livre d’artiste and artist’s book."

"There are two kinds of painters, the great ones, the real ones, they are plastic poets, they possess the imagination, that queen of faculties. For them, nature is only a quarry from which their genius extracts the matter of the temple that their hands create. Those create worlds of their own, they make us live there, they find the path of our soul, they finally dominate us. The others are mere observers incapable of discovering, linking and grouping the various elements to form a whole."

"“Still, modern western attitudes towards Plotinus have not been shaped by the widespread acknowledgment of the extraordinary similarity of his teachings to doctrines taught in India in his day; but by the role he unwittingly played after his death as a formative influence on Christian theology. Translations of his work may have a churchy kind of ring. The view of Plotinus as a kind of proto-Christian may express, at least in part, a dread of finding possible Indian origins for the texts whose influence was to contribute to shaping the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhardt, and many later western thinkers. So it is not only that “to admit 'oriental influences' on [Plotinus] was tantamount to besmirching his good name,” but even more it would also besmirch that whole aspect of the western tradition that flowed from him. If Plotinus had passed massive Asian influence into the western tradition, there would be little point to calling it western anymore.”"