Books
Films
Exhibits
“The designer is therefore the artist of today, not because he is a genius but because he works in such a way as to re-establish contact between art and the public, because he has the humility and ability to respond to whatever demand is made of him by the society in which he lives, because he knows his job, and the ways and means of solving each problem of design. And finally because he responds to the human needs of his time, and helps people to solve certain problems without stylistic preconceptions or false notions of artistic dignity derived from the schism of the arts.”
(Bruno Munari, Design as Art, trans. Patrick Creagh, p. 32.)
cf. Apollinaire on Duchamp:
“Just as a work by Cimabue was paraded through the streets, our century has seen Blériot’s airplane, bearing the weight of humanity, of thousands of years of endeavour, and of necessary art triumphantly paraded through Paris to the Arts-et-Métiers museum. It will perhaps fall to an artist as free of aesthetic considerations and as concerned with energy as Marcel Duchamp to reconcile Art and the People.”
(The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read, p. 75.)
(Older readings have been moved here.)
[display_podcast]
“Well, almost any photoist worth his chemicots will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying, well, what you do get is, well, a positively grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse. Tip. Well, this freely is what must have occurred to our missive (there’s a sod of a turb for you! please wisp off the grass!) unfilthed from the boucher by the sagacity of a lookmelittle likemelong hen. Heated residence in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound had partly obliterated the negative to start with, causing some features palpably nearer your pecker to be swollen up most grossly while the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Tip.”
(Finnegans Wake, pp. 111–2.)
I’d like to have a word
with you. Could we be alone
for a minute? I have been lying
until now. Do you believe
I believe myself? Do you believe
yourself when you believe me? Lying
is natural. Forgive me. Could we be alone
forever? Forgive us all. The word
is my enemy. I have never been alone;
bribes, betrayals. I am lying
even now. Can you believe
that? I give you my word.
(James Tate, from The Lost Pilot.)
Books
Films
“FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE (1821–1880), French novelist, was born at Rouen on the 12th of December 1821. . . . . Flaubert in his youth ‘was like a young Greek,’ full of vigour of body and a certain shy grace, enthusiastic, intensely individual, and apparently without any species of ambition. . . . . Returning to Paris, he wasted his time in sombre dreams, living on his patrimony. . . . . The personal character of Flaubert offered various peculiarities. He was shy, and yet extremely sensitive and arrogant; he passed from silence to an indignant and noisy flow of language. The same inconsistencies marked his physical nature; he had the build of a guardsman, with a magnificent Viking head, but his health was uncertain from childhood, and he was neurotic to the last degree. This ruddy giant was secretly gnawn by misanthropy and disgust of life.”
(Edmund Gosse, LL.D., in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, vol. X, p. 483.)
Books
Films
Exhibits
“ ‘That is perfectly true,’ the president admitted, ‘but their work is also more difficult than ever before. Criminals who operate in the grand manner have all sorts of things at their disposal nowadays. Science has done much for modern progress, but unfortunately it can be of invaluable assistance to criminals as well; the hosts of evil have the telegraph and the motorcar at their disposal just as authority has, and some day they will make use of the airplane.’ ”
(Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre, Fantômas, trans. unknown, p. 3.)
Books
Films