Quotes About Art

BEAUTY. The visionary authority of Childs's work resides, in part, in its lack of rhetoric. Her strict avoidance of cliché, and of anything that would make the work disjunctive, fragmented. The refusal of humor, self-mockery, flirtation with the audience, cult of personality. The distaste for the exhibitionistic: movement calling attention to itself, isolatable "effects." Beauty as, first of all, an art of refusal.

As long as art is understood and valued as an "absolute" activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially "priestly" aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear — and then sent away.

Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

To talk about camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves.

I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it.

In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

No sería erróneo hablar de una compulsión a fotografiar: a transformar la experiencia misma en una manera de ver.

Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of vocation—and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much.

El más lógico de los estetas del siglo XIX, Mallarmé, afirmó que en el mundo todo existe para culminar en un libro. Hoy todo existe para culminar en una fotografía.

No es del todo erróneo afirmar que no existe una mala fotografía, sino solo fotografías menos interesantes, menos relevantes, menos misteriosas.

Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists make drawings and paintings while photographers take photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

En lugar de una hermenéutica, necesitamos una erótica del arte.

I am thinking—talking—in images. I don't know how to write them down. Every feeling is physical.

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.

Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness.

Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.

Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.

Fotografiar es conferir importancia. Quizás no haya tema que no pueda ser embellecido; es más, no hay modo de suprimir la tendencia intrínseca de toda fotografía a dar valor a sus temas.

El fotógrafo saquea y preserva, denuncia y consagra a la vez.

La historia de la fotografía podría recapitularse como la pugna entre dos imperativos diferentes: el embellecimiento, que proviene de las bellas artes, y la veracidad.

A fotografia, mais recentemente, transformou-se num divertimento tão praticado como o sexo e a dança, o que significa que, como todas as formas de arte de massas, a fotografia não é praticada pela maioria das pessoas como arte. É sobretudo um rito social, uma defesa contra a ansiedade e um instrumento de poder.