#aesthetic

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it. ↗

— Michael Copperman

#authority #culpability #race #representation #art

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art. ↗

— Peter Weiss

#art #history #art

I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b. ↗

— Ariana Reines

#baudelaire #philip-guston #sentimentality #intelligence

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#books #imagination #literary #lover #object

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind. ↗

— Clive Bell

#alliance #art #between #circumstance #ecstasy

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#art #artist #beauty #art

The obsession with performance left no room for the development of the intuitive or spiritual impact of space and form other than the aesthetic of the machine itself. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#development #form #impact #intuitive #itself

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise. ↗

— Leo Kottke

#dealing #exercise #expensive #i #i think

In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing. ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#art #art

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors. ↗

— Walter Hamilton

#oscar-wilde #victorian #victorian-era #walter-hamilton #age