25 quotes
The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)
The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Time magazine (1996)
What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)
It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)
The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)
In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)
One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who believed in miracles, could have forseen that.
Barcelona (1992)
The truly radical work of art is the one that offers you something to hold on to in the midst of the flux of possibility.
Things I Didn't Know (2006)
I managed to fail Arts I, a course that a moderately intelligent amoeba could have passed without special coaching.
Things I Didn't Know (2006)
Our culture puts enormous emphasis on "socialization", on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others.
Things I Didn't Know (2006)
There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.
Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value.
Things I Didn't Know (2006)
Like most artists who have made an invention of some kind, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a Rosetta Stone, with whose help all representation can be rescued from one-eyed falsehood.
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)
I realized that there is nothing whatever outside of the life we have; that the "meaning of life" is nothing other than life itself, obstinately asserting itself against emptiness and nullity.
Things I Didn't Know (2006)
No original Gauguins were to be seen in Australia, for post-impressionism was officially thought to be the vulgar effusion of five-thumbed lunatics. (p. 24)
Donald Friend (1965)
How immeasurably fortunate my father was in his faith!
Things I Didn't Know (2006)
In the real world, mice do exist and they generally go about their business whether we see them or not. (p. 17)
The Shock of the New (1980)
It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)
Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.
Barcelona (1992)