It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.
In a world as vast as this one, seeing something once actually counts for a lot.
In his way of putting it, our existence comes before our essence, whereas for designed objects their essence comes before their existence.
Some people who think about these inequalities will just say, ‘Oh well, life’s not fair’ and shrug their shoulders. These are usually the ones who have been particularly lucky.
Everybody to count for one, nobody to count for more than one.
It’s not that truth is somehow ‘out there’ waiting for us to find it. Truth for James was simply what works, what has a beneficial impact on our lives.
I think today we do not know how to go about building a water fountain. What we know is how to build one thousand water fountains.
Great original artists take a tradition into themselves. They have not shunned but digested it. Then the very conflict set up between it and what is new in themselves and in their environment creates the tension that demands a new mode of expression.
To lure back enchantment, we must learn to create the nook, to appreciate the wilder garden, to consider the power of shadows and small spaces, to welcome living materials over insensate ones.
There’s a corollary to Andy Warhol’s idea that in the future everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes. Now, I think in the future nobody will be famous, only known locally to their friends and followers, because of the fragmentation of mass media.
People have done this before, but not us.
There is a story about a Japanese artist who painted a picture of a garden with trees. When it was finished, the patron asked why there was almost nothing in view – just a sprig of cherry with a small bird on it in one corner. ‘If I had filled the picture with things,’ the painter replied, ‘where would the bird have been able to fly?’
Impressionism could not have happened without the invention of the collapsible tube, which made it possible to paint outside. That was technology again.
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
What we see in Atget’s pictures, therefore, is partly time.
There was, however, a tension between the idea that the camera image simply was the truth, and the feeling that painting offered a way of depicting the world that was richer, and in an imaginative and emotional way, truer.
But that is what the photograph does: it separates us from the world.
The Chinese say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye and the heart.
The camera existed for centuries before the invention of photography in the early 19th century.
When you use a camera to draw a face what you are doing is fast-forwarding the measuring.
Often it is the soft lack of focus in certain areas – an effect that can only have been seen in an optically created image – that generates the mystery and beauty of his [Vermeer’s] art. Therefore, to deny he used a lens is to misunderstand his achievement, which lay, precisely, in finding the poetry in this new way of seeing the world.
You bring your own time to a picture, whereas film and video art bring their own time to you.
the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis.
The trouble was that they had a dictator now, which, according to some people (white), they had never had before, and according to other people (everyone else), they had only ever been having, constantly, since the beginning of the world.