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The Nefertiti bust is one of the most popular art works in the world. It is printed on scarves and molded in necklace pendants and coffee-table miniatures. But never in my experience is the bust exactly reproduced. The copyist softens it, feminizes it and humanizes it. The actual bust is intolerably severe. It is too uncanny an object for domestic display. Even art books lie. The bust is usually posed in profile or at an angle, so that the missing left pupil is hidden or shadowed. What happened to the eye?

— Camille Paglia Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

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Art

More quotes by Camille Paglia

Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion.

Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992)

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Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

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A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

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Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Camille Paglia (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.