Quotes

[ahn]

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

— Chuck Close

Yes.
I needed to read this today.

[Faust]

“As the allure of agreement — or conformism — grows, the perils of independence deepen. To differ is dangerous.” - Saul Bellow

[swami]

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

Kafka

[profondo nero]

"A man is less likely to become great the more he is dominated by reason: few can achieve greatness – and none in art – if they are not dominated by illusion." - Mario Panciera

[Sulk]

"Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth."

-Jean Baudrillard

[petricor]

I found this liberating.

"Feeling good about an outfit is the point at which that outfit finally becomes good." --Fran Lebowitz

Her recent interview is hilarious:

"Remember when the style was incredibly messy hair? That's great if you're a model. But if you're not a model, you would look better if you washed your hair, because you are not beautiful."

[Faust]

"Photography is the only major art in which professional training and years of experience do not confer an insuperable advantage over the untrained and inexperienced—this for many reasons, among them the large role that chance (or luck) plays in the taking of pictures, and the bias toward the spontaneous, the rough, the imperfect. (There is no comparable level playing field in literature, where virtually nothing owes to chance or luck and where refinement of language usually incurs no penalty; or in the performing arts, where genuine achievement is unattainable without exhaustive training and daily practice; or in film-making, which is not guided to any significant degree by the anti-art prejudices of much of contemporary art photography.) " - Susan Sontag

Maybe that somewhat explains the street style photographers.

[swami]

Well observed Susan, but the only flaw with the anti-art prejudice towards the art is that what really makes a photograph is the magic & POV unique to the photog which is = or > than the actual happenstance no?

[Faust]

"Today everything exists to end as a photograph" - Susan Sontag, in 1977. Too bad she did not get to live long enough - I'd've loved to read her on Instagram.

[Faust]

As he's gotten older, Espera's began to accept that maybe the white man's system isn't all that bad. Traveling the world as a Marine has opened his eyes to stark differences between the way Americans and those in less fortunate parts of the plant live. "All these countries around the world, nobody's fat," he says. "Back home, fat motherfuckers are everywhere. Seventy-five percent of all Americans are fat. Do you know how hard it is to put on thirty pounds? A motherfucker has to sit on the couch and do nothing but eat all day. In America, white trash and poor Mexicans are all fat as motherfuckers. The white man created a system with so much excess, even the poor motherfuckers are fat."

- Generation Kill

[Faust]

"I think the novelists who take the bitterest view of our modern condition make the most of the art of the novel... The writer's art appears to seek a compensation for the hopelessness and meanness of existence." - Saul Bellow

"Disappointment with its human material is built into the contemporary novel. It is
assumed that society cannot give the novelist 'suitable' themes and characters. Therefore the important humanity of the novel must be the writer's own. His force, his virtuosity, his powers of poetry, his reading of fate are at the center of his book. The reader is invited to bring his sympathies to the writer rather than to the characters, and this makes him something of a novelist too." - Saul Bellow

[Faust]

"Reticence, meanwhile, has become an obsolete virtue. People now readily name their diseases, rents, antidepressants. Sexual histories get spilled on first dates. Birkenstocks and cutoffs infiltrate the office on casual Fridays, telecommuting puts the boardroom in the bedroom, salespeople unilaterally address customers by their first name, watiers won't bring me food until I've established a personal relationship with them, voice-mail machinery stresses the "I" in "I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you dialed," and cyberenthusiasts, in a particularly grotesque misnomer, designate as "public forums" pieces of etched silicon with which a forum's unshaved "participant" may communicate while sitting crosslegged in tangled sheets. The networked world as a thread to privacy? It's the ugly spectacle of a privacy triumphant." - Jonathan Franzen (way before social media)

[Faust]

"I suspect that art has always been a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination, because ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened. The one genuine tragedy to befall us was slavery, and it's probably no accident that the tradition of Southern literature has been strikingly reach and productive of geniuses. (Compare the literature of the sunny, fertile, peaceful West Coast.) Superficially at least, for the great white majority, the history of this country has consisted of success and more success. Tragic realism preserves access to the dirt behind the dream of Chosenness - to the human difficulty beneath the technological ease, to the sorrow behind the pop-culture narcosis: to all those portents on the margins of our existence." - Jonathan Franzen

[Faust]

"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a away to have experience." - Flannery O'Connor

[Faust]

"Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us." - Jonathan Franzen