"No new artistic system will withstand the pressure of a growing new culture until the very foundation of Art will be erected on the real laws of life. Until all artists will say with us... All is a fiction... only life and its laws are authentic and in life only the active is beautiful and wise and strong and right, for life does not know beauty as an aesthetic measure... efficacious existence is the highest beauty. Life knows neither good nor bad nor justice as a measure of morals... need is the highest and most just of all morals. Life does not know rationally abstracted truths as a measure of cognizance, deed is the highest and surest of truths. Those are the laws of life. Can art withstand these laws if it is built on an abstraction, on mirage, and fiction?..."
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Quoted in: Naum Gabo, Michael Compton (1987) Naum Gabo: sixty years of constructivism. p. 8
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Naum_Gabo
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Naum Gabo
Naum Gabo (August 5, 1890 – August 23, 1977) was a prominent Russian sculptor in the Constructivism movement and a pioneer of kinetic art.
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