Beauty presents a stone wall to the thinking mind. But to the incarnate mind--deferential to the buzzing and gurgling body--beauty is as fluid, clear, and shining as an Indian summer afternoon.
I can think of few other artists so richly deserved by their times. For that very reason, whenever I go to contemplate a contemporary work of art for pleasure, it will not be a ....... .
At a party, it often happens that the person you find most glamorous is not the one you think of when it's time to go home.
Standing somewhere between history and myth, Gaugin persists as an evergreen contemporary: the artist as narcissist and provocateur, whoase genius is inextricable from his posturing.
It is well worth sticking around for his shuddery pleasures, laced with something cold and weird.
A spider's--or a painter's--fleeting stab at perfection is a negligible stitch in an unbounded fabric. Its only significance lies in our own momentary, mortal gaze as we reckon with eternity.
A creature that can think and sing like that will elude the explanatory grasp of science for the foreseeable future.
Desire was no longer an issue--only conviction mattered. ... They revel in Surrealism's labyrinth of intellectualized sex.
A cultivated appreciation of the pretty good sets us up to register the surprise of the great, which baffles our understanding and teaches us little except how to praise.
Beauty can be a kind of murder, snatching life out of time.
Standing close to them, I sometimes have the odd sense of passing through a looking glass--or is it a time machine?--from the art world that I know into one marked bu lusher, dirtier satisfactions. For a moment, it strikes me that this, precisely, is what I like. Then the mood evaporates.
We needn't live with Picasso, thank goodness, but only brain surgery could stop him from living in us.
Life goes on, if only because it has nowhere else to go.
Without cohering, the fragments begin to sketch a state of abounding joy.
Looking at his pictures, we approach the farthest frontiers of a necessary happiness.
We have yet to come to terms with these paintings, which refuse to settle down as examples of a period's style. They are as raw, irritating, and urgent as ever.
Present-day reality is a lot more like one of his pictures than I wish it were.
There would never again be anyone like Raphael--as his more alert contempories must have sensed--because never again would a fully developed, energetic, urbane culture coast on a tide of such complacent aplomb.
Minimalism ends where it begins, at the edge of a cliff. Any reaction against it can only be a turning-back.
Dada was and remains a drug, of the hallucenogenic type. ... Today, it can be 1916 again anytime, at the flash of a credit card.
What determines authenticity for me is a hardly scientific, no doubt fallible intuition of a raging need that found respite only in art.
Now I stumble into a comment upon my post. First pull out some of the abstractions with which we can communicate that seem to glue the above together and, at the least, are not contradicted by it.
ReplyDeleteNon rational and visceral
Essential to man
A form of experience which may be trained
Profoundly physical
Explicates the culture of an era
But not inextricable from an era
Like dancing, bowel movement, sex ...
If we dislike our times enough, the ugly becomes the beauty?
Raphaelo for them, almost any exhibit, the more weird the better, for those of us who loathe our culture.
That's too rational. It's still visceral and in some way joyful.