Quotes About Interpretation

There's two heads to every coin.

One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70)

One man's affirmation of the consecuent is another's man inference to the best explanation (Psychosemantics, pp. 149)

Then suddenly—or so it seemed to me—in the past two years Calvinism began emerging as an issue everywhere. Perhaps I am just waking up, but it seems to me that this peculiar doctrine is being promoted far more widely and aggressively now than I was ever aware in the past.4

Since Protestant theology makes no claim that the Bible is crystal clear beyond that minimal knowledge necessary for salvation, it implicitly acknowledges that Christians may differ without having to accuse each other of intellectual weakness or moral corruption.

To engage with art, we have to be willing to be wrong, venture outside our psychic comfort zones, suspend disbelief, and remember that art explores and alters consciousness simultaneously.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.

Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

Contrary to popular opinion, things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.

Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken language is our thing.

Money is something that can be measured art is not. It's all subjective.

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes, placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both, and create a third thing.

Bad art teaches you as much as good art, maybe more.

Did you ever meet someone who either had no sense of humor or was never serious, you couldn't tell which?

For the casual viewer, Kurosawa's films can be an exercise in endurance.

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Graphic expression is the artist's impression...

Que letra tan fea! Dijo papá un día disgustado. En todo caso, el único que podía leer aquellos poemas era yo, esa era mi intensión.

That's just how it is with history. You do things and later on when people see what you did, it looks bad.

Of silence, I can say only what I heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave–and so speech isn't itself, but its effect, and silence is the same.