Art

"In such miniature paintings the theme of lyric poetry was depicted with strong confident lines, throbbing colours, and bold patterns, but controlled workmanship. The lively landscape created a standard for these outstanding illustrations."

"By the beginning of the twentieth century, flowers, faces and miniature landscapes began to appear beside patterns of pointed stars, and to this day annual contests reward the most creative artists in this tradition."

"Since earliest times men have loved to make small likenesses of themselves and of their animals. The ancient Greeks kept images of the gods in their houses to watch over the inmates; they place statutes in graves to please the dead, and they offered others to the nymphs of a spring so that water might flow fresh in the fountain. Such ideas lingered long and sustained a craft that gradually turned from religious to artistic pre-occupations and from the production of primitive images to true miniature sculpture."

"The selection range in miniature sculpture are: religious, frivolous, theatrical, funeral, not to mention vases and lamps. The greatest virtuosity was reached during the Hellenistic period (325-86BC)."

"The copper patina-clad statue, dedicated on October 28, 1886, commemorates the centennial of the United States and is a gesture of friendship from France to America. Frederic Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the statue and obtained a U.S. patent useful for raising construction funds through the sale of miniatures."

"Survival kit contents check. In them you'll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good time."

"Artifacts of our oldest cultures give evidence that the human race has always made things in miniature. The early American Indians made ...dolls, toys, and miniature implements for their children. Toys have been found in Egyptian tombs as well as in archaeological digs of ancient China. The fascination for things in miniature is still strong for most people today."

"Dr. Strangelove in: Quotes for Maj. T.J. 'King' Kong (Character) in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb , IMDb,"

"We had a large old-fashioned battery, a wet cell, in the kitchen, hooked up to an electric bell. The bell was too complicated to understand at first, and the battery, to my mind, was more immediately attractive, for it contained an earthenware tube with a massive, gleaming copper cylinder in the middle, immersed in a bluish liquid, all this inside an outer glass casing, also filled with fluid, and containing a slimmer bar of zinc. It looked like a miniature chemical factory of sorts, and I thought I saw little bubbles of gas, at times, coming off the zinc. The Daniell cell (as it was called) had a thoroughly nineteenth-century, Victorian look about it, and this extraordinary object was making electricity all by itself—not by rubbing or friction, but just by the virtue of its own chemical reactions."

"The first of the “request” prayers in the daily Amidah is a fractal. It replicates in miniature the structure of the Amidah as a whole (Praise-Request-Thanks)."

"In the seventeenth century, it was held by some that inside a human sperm there was a minute human being - a homunculus - that was planted inside the womb. Development consisted of the miniature homunculus enlarging and passing through birth and on to [[maturity-just like inflating a balloon."

"I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too."

"I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is - at last what – I have found."

"Mushrooms are miniature pharmaceutical factories, and of the thousands of mushroom species in nature, our ancestors and modern scientists have identified several dozen that have a unique combination of talents that improve our health."

"All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art."

"Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach."

"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work . . . all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art."

"In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman."

"Language is the most formless means of expression. Its capacity to describe concepts without physical or visual references carries us into an advanced state of abstraction."

"Conceptual art, more than all previous types of art, questions the fundamental nature of art. Unhappily, the question is strictly limited to the exclusive domain of fine art. There is still potential of it enabling an examination of all that surrounds art, but in reality, conceptual artists are dedicated only to exploring avant-garde aesthetic problems."

"If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us."

"After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations."

"By adopting language as their exclusive medium, Weiner, Barry, Wilson, Kosuth and Art & Language were able to sweep aside the vestiges of authorial presence manifested by formal invention and the handling of materials"

"Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio."

"Conceptual Art in the broadest sense was a kind of laboratory for innovations in the rest of the century. An unconscious international energy emerged from the raw materials of friendship, art history, interdisciplinary readings and a fervor to change the world and the ways artists related to it."

"I don't know if I'm making myself clear, but if I were to accept this business of conceptual art I would have no reason to exist."

"The general ignorance of the visual arts, especially their theoretical bases, deplorable even in the so-called intellectual world; the artist’s well-founded despair of ever reaching the mythical “masses” with “advanced art”; the resulting ghetto mentality predominant in the narrow and incestuous art world itself, with its resentful reliance on a very small group of dealers, curators, critics, editors, and collectors who are all too frequently and often unknowingly bound by invisible apron strings to the “real world’s” power structure—all of these factors may make it unlikely that conceptual art will be any better equipped to affect the world any differently than, or even as much as, its less ephemeral counterparts."

"The main qualifications to the lesser position of painting is that advances in art are certainly not always formal ones."

"We are still spellbound by a tradition that arranged psychological faculties hierarchically, relegating ‘sensuousness’ — that is, perception — to a lower position in comparison to higher, reflective functions of reason and understanding. The most advanced versions of ‘conceptual art’ still follow this tradition. By refusing to base themselves in sensuously perceptible distinctions between works of art and other objects, these works seek to avoid reducing art to the realm of sense perception."

"Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing."

"Concept art is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of e.g. music is sound. Since concepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language."

"I do not mind objects, but I do not care to make them."

"Great art – or good art – is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different. There's boring conceptual art and there's boring traditional art. Great art is if you can't stop thinking about it, then it becomes a memory."

"The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more."

"Conceptual Art is a sounding instrument between printed words, luminous writings, and letters scrawled in a hasty nervous instinctive calligraphy."

"Roy Ascott... powerfully demonstrates the significant intersections between conceptual art and art and technology, exploding the conventional autonomy of these art historical categories."

"The main virtue of geometric shapes is that they aren't organic, as all art otherwise is. A form that's neither geometric or organic would be a great discovery."

"Compared to other neo-avant-garde movements that emerged during the 1960s, conceptual art is conspicuous by virtue of the lack of serious discussion by art historians and critics over the last two decades. This gap in the reception is particularly ironic given the tremendous influence conceptual art has had on subsequent artistic developments, on the critical discussion surrounding the concept of postmodernism, and on the recognition and use, more generally, of various forms of theory by artists, curators, critics, and historians."

"Well sure, my sculptures are floor pieces. Each one, like any area on the surface of the earth,, supports a column of air that weighs – what is it? – 14.7 pounds per square inch. So in a sense, that might represent a column. It’s not an idea, it’s a sense of something you know, a demarked place. Somehow I think I always thought of it going that way, rather than an idea of a narrowing triangle going to the center of the earth... I have nothing to do with conceptual art. I’m not interested in ideas. If I were interested in ideas, I’d be in a field where what we think in is ideas... I don’t really know what an idea is. One thing for me is that if I can frame something in language, I would never make art out of it. I make art out of things which cannot be framed in any other way. (December 1969, talking with the audience)"

"the price of Conceptual Art's entry into the polite society during the 70s was surrender of its abrasiveness and anomalousness. By the middle of the decade much of what had been the Conceptual Art movement was transformed into a 'radically responsible' publicity through appropriation of the methods of semiology."

"The term Maya has been translated as 'illusion,' but then it does not concern normal illusion. Here 'illusion' does not mean that the world is not real and simply a figment of the human imagination. Maya means that the world is not as it seems; the world that one experiences is misleading as far as its true nature is concerned."

"Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain...that it is juicy...and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."

"The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate."

"The atman believes that "it is a consistent reality, but this is an illusion: There is only one reality, which is that of 'God' (i.e. Brahman). In the classic formula, Âtman is Brahman, but until I have attained 'liberation' I am under the contrary illusion.""

"To perceive yourself as a vulnerable body that was born and a little later dies - that's the illusion. Body and death: one illusion. You cannot have one without the other. You want to keep one side of the illusion and get rid of the other, but that is impossible. Either you keep all of it or you relinquish all of it. p. 124"

"To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the resent moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. p. 36"

"If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality. p. 20"

"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."

"When the ego is at war, know that it is no more than an illusion that is fighting to survive... All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. p. 50"

"The fundamental principle of art is deception. A work of art is either an illusion or delusion. It is never an exact reproduction of nature or facts. A portrait which accurately represents an original is not artistic. A painting, a photograph, an engraving is such a disposition of white upon black or of colours as to produce the illusion of relief."