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Post by Tamrin on Aug 12, 2012 17:39:06 GMT 10
The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive
So much of art – not all of it thank god, but a lot of it – has just become a kind of cruddy game for the self-aggrandisement of the rich and the ignorant, it is a kind of bad but useful business
What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude
A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shopRobert Hughes, AOAustralian-born art critic, writer and maker of television documentaries (Died 6 August 2012) (Portrait by Louis Kahan, 1963) At one point I saw Death. He was sitting at a desk, like a banker. He made no gesture, but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended to become a tunnel: the bocca d’inferno of old Christian art
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