Art Critics

"This book of 700 close-printed pages is remarkable for its range of erudition covering the ancient religiophilosophical thought and some aspects of the art of the diverse cultures from Greece through the Near East to Persia and India. It is the fruit of some 30 years of research. But is is also remarkable for many misrepresentations, some egregious errors of fact and, consequently, injudicious conclusions.... McEvilley himself, as has been demonstrated in the preceding pages, shows repeated willfulness in (mis-)representing and (mis-)handling of the evidence. Nonetheless, this erudite book is worth consulting provided the reader can spot the author’s facile assumptions, careless remarks, sweeping generalizations and unwarranted judgments."

"Thomas McEvilley has explained the likely Indian origins of some aspects of Greek thought. For instance, he says the Western intellectuals' cover-up of the likely Indian origins of Plotinus protects Western identity and historicity: 'Translations of his work may have a churchy kind of ring. The view of Plotinus as a kind of proto-Christian theologian 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, Nicolas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, 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 tradition' ."

"This is a stimulating book. But... it suffers from assuming the late but generally accepted in Western academic circles dating of the Ṛgveda, as well as McEvilley’s lack of a specialist’s knowledge of the Ṛgveda and early Indian thought. ...In general, McEvilley sees undue Ancient Mesopotamian and to a lesser extent Ancient Egyptian influence behind the development of Indus Valley civilization and in the specifics of Vedic and later Indian literature, which tendency is so exaggerated that it comes across as an unpleasant prejudice."

"“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.”"

"Still, it would be an equally egregious mistake to conclude that India lacks a distinctive and world-important character of its own. Nothing, it seems, comes out of nothing, and no culture is born by parthenogenesis. Ancient Greek culture has had at least as much input from the same sources without being denied its own “miraculous” selfhood."

"Romila Thapar, an Indian historian... is reviled by some Indian scholars for her acquiescence to many western points of view."

"In the works of Salvatore Garau, spaces of structures that shake with movements reminiscent of strong winds, earthquakes, or architectural formations, and that, in maintaining clarity and geometric objectivity, relate to the play of emotions in a frenzy that can be disturbing, unconscious, and irrational."

"Salvatore Garau, triumph of immediacy, aesthetic enjoyment, power of color, free spontaneity, a call to something gigantic, powerful, improbable, to something absent but substantial; this is what manifests itself in the new, small, enigmatic sheets that Salvatore Garau dedicated to Richard Wagner. The movement of the stripes of color - pulsating, restless, unpredictable, paths of unstoppable energies and tensions - suggest wind and flames, bodies that contort and interpenetrate, full of power and sensual force [...] seductive and disturbing are not however dedicated only to Richard Wagner [...] features that are not secondary to understand his poetics, in which an obsessive monochromatism, made up of shades of red, seems to evoke the spirit of the mythical struggles of the heroes of Wagner."

"This cosmic character of Salvatore Garau's figurative world, this emotionalized universalism links his aesthetics with the tradition of romanticism, especially of romantic landscape painting, in which imposing natural phenomena are interpreted as a metaphor for the cosmos and the metaphysical hierarchy of existence."

"A far more important lesson to learn from artists is not that they fail, but that they prevail. Artists make. Artists do."

"To give up before we even start, using low self-esteem or lack of qualifications as an excuse, is, frankly, gutless. As human beings we are all born with not only the wherewithal to be creative, but also the need."

"If necessity is the mother of invention, curiosity is the father. After all, you cannot produce something interesting if you are not interested in something. Outputs need inputs."

"Creativity is a constant process of call and response taking place inside our heads. If all is going well, the question–answer routine is like the two sides of our brain working together as if in an inner-cranial pas de deux."

"That’s how ideas are generated. Unusual combinations, mixing old and new, stimulate original ideas, that is, ideas with origins."

"Decision-making is the tortuous by-product of the Socratic method. Because at some point skepticism and questioning have to give way to personal judgment in the shape of a decision made. And that is the most daunting part of a forbidding process. As Socrates knew only too well, the more you question the more you realize that there are no concrete answers. Doubt reigns supreme, an inescapable truth he succinctly expressed when he said, “All I know is that I know nothing.”"

"The problem is, some of us have either convinced ourselves that we are not creative, or are yet to find our way. Confidence in our own creativity can wane. Which is bad. Confidence is crucial. In my experience artists, like a lot of us, fear being “found out.” But somehow they manage to summon up enough self-belief to overcome the self-doubt, which enables them to back their creativity. The Beatles were just a bunch of young lads with time on their hands who found the confidence to persuade themselves and then the world that they were musicians."

"In reality, artists are no more courageous or noble or single-minded than the farmers who go to extreme lengths, in extreme weather, to protect their herd. Or a restaurateur who—having waved goodbye to her last customer at midnight—hauls herself out of bed at 4 A.M. the following morning to make sure she’s at the market in time to buy the best produce. Or, for that matter, a master bricklayer who has calloused fingers and an aching back from days spent building a house."

"Artists are entrepreneurs. They are willing to stake everything for the chance to go it alone and make the work they feel compelled to create. They will beg and borrow to pay the rent on their studio, to buy the necessary materials, and to feed themselves during the long months of endeavor."

"If at first you don’t succeed, don’t try exactly the same thing again. You won’t succeed, again. Instead, have a think, evaluate, correct, modify and then try again. Creativity is an iterative process."

"It is, after all, our imagination that makes us human. Vincent van Gogh asked, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” To which the answer is, I would have thought, boring, bordering on pointless."

"Creativity, like society, thrives when the individual elements fit within, and add to, a bigger picture."

"She pointed up to a shelf of plates stacked vertically in a rack above the sink. “Choose one,” she said. I must have looked nonplussed. “Choose a plate,” she repeated. And then explained that she collects plates, but only ever one of any type. It was up to the guest to decide which one would be theirs for the duration of the stay. “We’re not robots,” she said. “Life is more exciting when you have an opinion.”"

"Duchamp is a worthy role model. Added to which he believed passionately that anyone could be an artist and spent his life showing the rest of us how it is done. He chose fine art as the vehicle for his imagination, but his approach could equally well be applied to any area of creative endeavor. His trick was to spend more time thinking than doing. He would pause for thought and ponder on life and creativity and how things might be. Which is what I’m going to do now."

"Would it be any better if all schools were art schools? I think so. But whatever your view, there are few more exciting areas than education in our digital age. I know tech and media and neuroscience are sexier, but for sheer untapped potential that is waiting to be realized by a new generation of thinkers and doers, I doubt there’s anything to beat education as a place to work right now. So much is about to change, including, I would have thought, our relationship with academia. A combination of an intellectually ambitious aging population, an emerging creative economy, and a digitized world will lead to many of us renewing or expanding our ties with education. The notion that formal learning stops when we are barely adults will seem very odd in future. As will the idea that someone has one single career for life. If you’re going to be working until you’re eighty, the chances are you’ll want to explore several fields and not plow the same furrow decade after decade."

"The future depends on us taking a different approach. One in which we can all express ourselves and contribute to society by using our unique imagination and talent. It’s our brains not our brawn that makes us special and life worth living. Artists had that worked out a long time ago."

"Die Moderne ist nur in unserem Wunsche und sie ist draußen überall, außer uns. Sie ist nicht in unserem Geiste. Sondern das ist die Qual und die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, die fieberische und schnaubende, daß das Leben dem Geiste entronnen ist. Das Leben hat sich gewandelt, bis in den letzten Grund, und wandelt sich immer noch aufs neue, alle Tage, rastlos und unstät. Aber der Geist blieb alt und starr und regte sich nicht und bewegte sich nicht und nun leidet er hilflos, weil er einsam ist und verlassen vom Leben."

"Es geht eine wilde Pein durch diese Zeit und der Schmerz ist nicht mehr erträglich. Der Schrei nach dem Heiland ist gemein und Gekreuzigte sind überall. Ist es das große Sterben, das über die Welt gekommen?"

"In quello che è il codice di figurazione del pittore Kodra, persone, cose, interi paesaggi sono schematizzati in squadrate forme geometriche. Attraverso simile processo geometrizzante l'artista, intende chiaramente dare rappresentazione del condizionamento entro il quale è costretto a muoversi, a vivere, l'uomo contemporaneo. La figura umana assume, così rappresentata, un'aspetto robotico, divenendo personificazione delluomo postindustriale, il robot cibernetico e informatico, l'uomo numero."

"Si direbbe che Kodra tra le sfaccettature del tardo cubismo del primo dopoguerra, abbbia rintracciato le scaglie luminose dei vecchi mosaici bizzantini. I bagliori delle antiche moschee e le favolosità dei pastori bivaccano su le pendici dell'Olimpo."

"His black saints (of Fathi Hassan), facing a timeless space and without noise, fix nothing, expressing the absolute suffering of African culture, deep and highly symbolic and solemn elephants adorned with red are exposed to the eyes of the world (Giovanni Carandente)"

"These saints (of Fathi Hassan) look at nothing, as if facing the ideality of a timeless space and therefore without the sound of worldly looks. They condense, within their peoples, the condition of absolute suffering of a culture, the African, profound and highly symbolic, open to the fluidity of a sentiment suited to the absolute and not to the precariousness of everyday life."

"My sense, in bringing to art the double criteria of meaning and embodiment, is to bring to art a connection with cognizance: to what is possible and, to the faithful, to the actual. Gregory the Great spoke of the carved capitals in the Romanesque basilica as the Bible of the Illiterate: they show what the Bible tells us took place. They tell the uneducated what they are supposed to know. That is, they tell them what they are to believe as true. Beauty has nothing to do with it, though the capable carver presents the Queen of Sheba as the great beauty she was. It is possible that she looked that way. But it can be art without being beautiful at all. Beauty was an eighteenth century value."

"The great thing about the sixties was the dawning recognition that anything could be a work of art, which was something evident in all the main movements of the time—in Pop art, Minimalism, Fluxus, Conceptual art, and so on. What accounted for the difference? The big mantra in the art world was Frank Stella’s sullen “What you see is what you see.” But there was not a lot of difference between what you see when you see a Brillo Box by Warhol and the Brillo boxes designed by James Harvey for the Brillo people to use for moving their products about. So: why weren’t they artworks if Andy’s Factory-produced boxes were? I have answered this in my first chapter, so what I want to do now instead is to marvel at the way in which the camera helped give form to the philosophical question that had been kicking around for a few millennia, “What is art?,” and to explain why the photography-painting paragone had to be the last paragone. By the time Duchamp and Warhol had left the scene, everything in the concept of art had been changed. We had entered the second phase in the history of art, broadly considered."

"What impresses me is that Kant’s highly compressed discussion of spirit is capable of addressing the logic of artworks invariantly as to time, place, and culture, and of explaining why Formalism is so impoverished a philosophy of art. The irony is that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is so often cited as the foundational text for Formalistic analysis. What Modernist Formalism did achieve, on the other hand—and Greenberg recognizes this—was the enfranchisement of a great deal of art that the Victorians, say, would have found “primitive,” meaning that the artists who made it would have carved or painted like nineteenth century Europeans if they only knew how. African sculpture came to be appreciated for its “expressive form” by Roger Fry, and by the severe Bloomsbury Formalist Clive Bell in his book Art. That meant that it was ornamentalized, in effect, like the tattoo, according to Kant. I often wonder if those who celebrated Kant aesthetics read as far as section forty-nine of his book, where he introduces his exceedingly condensed view of what makes art humanly important."

"The body that feels thirst and hunger, passion, desire, and love. The body that we understand when we read the ancients describing men in battle, men and women in love and in grief. The body, I would say, that our artistic tradition dealt with so gloriously for so many centuries, and somewhat less gloriously in a certain kind of performance art today."

"It struck me only recently that nineteenth century painters must have believed that visual truth was defined by photography, however alien to human vision what the camera reproduced often was. A good example of this would have been Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of horses in motion. Painters decided that Muybridge’s images showed what horses really look like when they run, and in effect copied Muybridge’s photographs in their paintings of horses, even though that is not at all the way we see horses when they run. We really don’t see animals move the way Muybridge shows them moving, or else there would have been no need for the photographs in the first place: Muybridge hit upon his awkward but seemingly authoritative experiments that were really designed to answer such questions as whether all four of a horse’s hooves ever touch the ground at the same time—in other words, phenomena the human eye could not perceive."

"My thought is that if some art is imitation and some art is not, neither term belongs to the definition of art as philosophically understood. A property is part of the definition only if it belongs to every work of art there is."

"It is true that art today is pluralistic. Pluralism was noticed by certain followers of Ludwig Wittgenstein. What makes art so powerful a force as it appears to be in song and story is due to what makes it art to begin with. There is really nothing like it when it comes to stirring the spirit."

"As a philosopher, I would cherish an argument which demonstrates that the mind cannot be mapped onto the brain any better than the Sistine ceiling can be mapped onto the brushstrokes—and that Eliminativists are as misled as Colalucci. It would be great if the analogy itself were accepted, even if we did not know where to go from there."

"Thanks to Descartes and Plato, I will define art as “wakeful dreams.” One wants to explain the universality of art. My sense is that everyone, everywhere, dreams. Usually this requires that we sleep. But wakeful dreams require of us that we be awake. Dreams are made up of appearances, but they have to be appearances of things in their world. True, the different arts in the encyclopedic museum are made by different cultures."

"There were limits to what art—composed of such genres as portraiture, landscape, still life, and historical painting (the latter of which, in royal academies, enjoyed the highest esteem)—could do to show movement."

"Any movement can be a dance movement and hence achieve the dreamlike. The same may be true of acting, as when, for example, an actress serves cocktails that are actually glasses filled with just water. To taste the tasteless is a kind of bad dream. It is not possible to catalog all the different ways artists have found to dream-ify. I’ll take a flier at Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the great decoration of the Sistine Chapel’s vault, with the scenes of a narrative in which, when I first saw it, figures move in and out of an enveloping dark."

"Non c'è niente nella sua pittura che la Sicilia non possa spiegare."

"The mafia itself does not bring anything to mind. Like the homeland, the dead of Solferino. Ancient things. [...] Sciascia was a civil writer, a schoolteacher who wanted to teach us good social manners. But revisiting him today is like rereading Silvio Pellico. His function has been exhausted. We no longer need Sciascia. We need a new reflection, another Sicilian consciousness."

"For the poet Aaro Hellaakoski there was 'negative fire' in the steely blue skies of winter."

"Our poor friend Sisley, alas! will not assist at the final triumph, which is near, and of which he has seen but the dawning: he is gone too soon, and just at the moment when, in reparation for long injustice, full homage is about to be rendered those strong and charming qualities which make him a painter exquisite and original among them all, a magician of light, a poet of the heavens, of the waters, of the trees — in a word, one of the most remarkable landscapists of this day."

"When the early morning sun"

"From his hole so wet and drenching"

"I think that anyone who will take the trouble to consider the matter carefully will arrive at the same conclusion as I have, that art owes its origin to Nature herself, that this beautiful creation the world supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it."

"In our time it has been seen, as I hope to show quite shortly, that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature. Much more then it is probable that the first men, being less removed from their divine origin, were more perfect, possessing a brighter intelligence, and that with Nature as a guide, a pure intellect for master, and the lovely world as a model, they originated these noble arts, and by gradually improving them brought them at length, from small beginnings, to perfection. I do not deny that there must have been an originator, since I know quite well that there must have been a beginning at some time, due to some individual."