#criticism

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its manifestation in the writing of the 1590s and the decades which follow. The euphoria of Elizabeth's global affirmation of authority was undermined in these years by intimations of mortality: in 1590 she was 57 years old. No one could tell how much longer her golden age would last; hence, in part, Spenser's attempts to analyse and encapsulate that glory in an epic of the age. This concern about the death of a monarch who - as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen - was both symbol and totem, underscores the deeper realisation that mortality is central to life. After the Reformation, the certainties of heaven and hell were less clear, more debatable, more uncertain. ↗

— Ronald Carter

#age

Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and 1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of 'Wessex', but the explorer of the transition of lives and minds from the age of traditional values and religious certainties to the age of godlessness and modern tragedy, a transition sometimes described as 'the clash of the modern'. ↗

— Ronald Carter

#age

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#academics #art #art-history #artists #arts

One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did. ↗

— Chris Ware

#criticism #art

Psychotherapy is the art of finding the angel of hope in the midst of terror, despair and madness. ↗

— Cloe Madanes

#herstory #mft #art

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#criticism #oscar-wilde #peril #read #surface

All great art is praise. ↗

— John Ruskin

#painting #philosophy #art

In his 1923 review of James Joyce Ulysses, T. S. Eliot focused on one of his generation's recurrent anxieties--the idea that art might be impossible in the twentieth century. The reasons that art seemed impossible are many and complex, but they were all related to the collapse of ways of knowing that had served the Western mind at least since the Renaissance and that had received canonical formulation in the seventeenth century in the science of Newton and the philosophy of Descartes. In both science and philosophy, the crisis was essentially epistemological; that is, it was related to radical uncertainty about how we know what we know about the real world. This crisis, disorienting even to specialists, was at once a cause of despair and an incentive for innovation in the arts. ↗

— Jewel Spears Brooker

#art

Because his [Damien Hirst] art is idea art - art drawn on the back of cigarette packets and beer mats, roughed out in airport departure lounges and the back of the taxis, usually delegated to and carried by others - this leaves Damien a lot of time for what might loosely be called socializing. Hanging around. ↗

— Gordon Burn

#criticism #pop-culture #art

its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent ↗

— Mark O'Connell

#criticism #language #writing #art