Chuck Close, Big Self-Portrait, 1967-1968, [source]
"It's the tension between the marks on a flat surface, and then the image built, that interested me. And I was always a dyed-in-the-wool formalist anyway. I think process sets you free, because you know you don't have good days or bad days. You just show up. You don't wait for inspiration."
-- Chuck Close
Vija Celmins, Gun with Hand #1, 1964, [source]
"I did a lot of drawing of course [as a child]. You know we all did drawing, that’s how it started. You know you’re little, you start drawing. Just keep drawing. It sort of makes a certain kind of life. I guess drawing and reading, I used to read a lot. I made a sort of world. Read a lot, draw a lot, that’s what I used to do."-- Vija Celmins, interview for Art: 21.
William Kentridge, Crowd Pleaser, 2005 [source]
"This is the point we have reached. This is the state of confusion, ignorance and overwhelming stupidity in the midst of which the very few painters whose brains are clear and whose eyes are clean are preparing to return to pictorial science following the principles and teachings of our old masters. Their first lesson was drawing; drawing, the divine art, the foundation of every plastic construction, skeleton of every good work, eternal law that every artifice must follow. Drawing, ignored, neglected and deformed... drawing, I say, will return not as a fashion as those who talk of artistic events are accustomed to say, but as an inevitable necessity, as a condition sine qua non of good creation."
- Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), The Return to Craft
"Who has ever had a good idea at a cocktail party?" - Elizabeth Murray
in Art City: Making it in Manhattan
"Perhaps it is because of this sense of beginning, a fresh start, a ground zero, that artist after artist has taken up the grid as the medium within which to work, always taking it up as though he were just discovering it, as though the origin he had found by peeling back layer after layer of representation to come at last to this schematized reduction, this graph-paper ground, were his origin, and his finding it an act of originality. Waves of abstract artists "discover" the grid; part of its structure one could say is that in its revelatory character it is always a new, a unique discovery."-Rosalind Krauss
from "The Originality of the Avant-Garde," 1981
"Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naive. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and good taste in ideas.)- Susan Sontag, Notes on "Camp", 1961.
Matt Johnson, Two Orange Peels, 2003
"Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of a loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits — witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little, and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling.Or, conclusively, peel an orange. Do it lovingly — in perfect quarters like little boats, or in staggered exfoliations like a flat map of the round world, or in one long spiral, as my grandfather used to do. Nothing is more likely to become garbage than orange rind; but for as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap.
That, you know, is why the world exists at all. It remains outside the cosmic garbage can of nothingness, not because it is such a solemn necessity that nobody can get rid of it, but because it is the orange peel hung on God's chandelier, the wishbone in His kitchen closet. He likes it; therefore, it stays. The whole marvelous collection of stones, skins, feathers, and string exists because at least one lover has never quite taken His eye off it, because the Dominus vivificans has his delight with the sons of men."
The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection, Robert Farrar Capon
"But hell can endure for only a limited period and life will begin again one day. History may perhaps have an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true. Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most distinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One cannot reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish from history everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existence and of labour. Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty."-Albert Camus, from "Creation and Revolution," excerpted from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
"What country lacks its small clique of cultural arts; its troop of careerist intellectuals. It is obligatory. From one capital to another, they ape each other marvelously; they practice an artificial, Esperanto art tirelessly copied everywhere. Is art the right word? Does it actually have anything to do with art?It is fairly widely thought that in considering the artistic production of intellectuals, one is at the same time grasping the flower of production in general, since intellectuals, being drawn from the common people, cannot lack any of their qualities, having rather those additional qualities acquired by wearing out their trousers on the schoolroom bench — without allowing for the fact that intellectuals think themselves by definition far more intelligent than ordinary people. But is this really so? One also meets plenty of people with a far less favourable opinion of the intellectual type. The intellectual type seems to them directionless, impenetrable, lacking in vitamins, a swimmer in pap. Empty, without magnetism, without vision.
Perhaps the solid seat of the intellectual has been pulled out from under him. The intellectual's labours are always carried out while seated: at school, at conferences, at congresses. Often while dozing; sometimes while dead. Dead in one's seat."
Jean Dubuffet, from "Crude Art Preferred to Cultural Art," 1949
