"The practitioners within the gated community of contemporary art - that is, the artists and the critics who qualify their art - are, for all intents and purposes, a cult group. That cult has long since become the new Salon where the canons of accepted taste are enforced with a rigidity that would have made Bouguereau jealous. The only difference is that instead of a pedantic mastery of drawing, painting, perspective and rendering, we instead have a pedantic mastery of all the accepted attitudes about race, class, sex, and politics. Since skill is no longer necessary to practice art successfully, the only things left are: 1) appropriate subject matter (paradoxically, the more inappropriate the better); and 2) the right politics."
- Roger Kimball, "Why the Art World is a Disaster", New Criterion, 2007
"It doesn't matter what it is, you have to have something to fight. Doesn't have to be a mountain, but it has to be something. And it isn't important whether you win or lose - only that you keep fighting."
- Willi Unsoeld, mountaineering legend
No comments :
Post a Comment