Having seen this reproduction, one can go to the National Gallery to look at the original and discover what the reproduction lacks. Alternatively one can forget about the quality of the reproduction and simply be reminded, when one sees the original, that it is a famous painting of which somewhere one has already seen a reproduction. But in either case the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction.
We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless ‘thing’ and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the ‘thing’ which is waiting to be articulated.
Preachers love only their own voices.
The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester’s motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.
The small family living unit lacks space, Earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in his exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods. This is the material process which lies behind the truism the pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses. They are creatures of their owners way of life.
Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection – the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.
Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion.
The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.
The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. It is worth comparing this famous text of Bakunin’s with one of Picasso’s most famous remarks about his own art. ‘A painting’, he said, ’is a sum of destructions.
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
She was now the center of what surrounded her. All that was not her made space for her.
There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.
In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.
If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.
We have no word for this darkness. It is not night and it is not ignorance. From time to time we all cross this darkness, seeing everything: so much everything that we can distinguish nothing. You know it, Marisa, better than I. It’s the interior from which everything came.
Their space has absolutely nothing in common with that of a stage. When experts pretend that they can see here ‘the beginnings of perspective’, they are falling into a deep, anachronistic trap. Pictorial systems of perspective are architectural and urban – depending upon the window and the door. Nomadic ‘perspective’ is about coexistence, not about distance.
The garden is a kind of sanctuary.
Publicity has another social function. The fact that this function has not been planned as a purpose by those make and use publicity in no way lessens its significance. Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy.