Don't explain, don't apologise

For a project I have in mind for sometime in the future I was researching quotes from artists. And I came across this terrible terrible advice...

 

Luckily I turned to the greats and found...

"Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really." - Balthus

"I refuse to confide and don’t like it when people write about art." - Balthus

"Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible" - Rene Magritte

"The purpose of art is mystery" - Rene Magritte 

"For art to appear, we must disappear" -  Stephen Nachmanovitch

"The artist must be void" - Balthus

"Avoid tautology" - Geoff Dyer/John Berger (don’t’ describe a picture which is in front of you)

"One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness" - Giorgio de Chirico

"The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word." - Marcel Duchamp

"Never apologize, never explain. Just get the thing done and let them howl." – Agnes Macphail

That last quote is about politics, but it could be applied to art.


Comments

  1. omnivoristSunday, 08 November, 2020

    Couldn't agree more.

    Of course, the thing that GPT-3 is supremely good at is writing artist manifestos

    ReplyDelete
  2. Owen RansenSaturday, 14 November, 2020

    You've worked on it for poetry, have you really done it for artistic manifestos? We should create a movement based on whatever GPT-3 comes up with...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. omnivoristSaturday, 14 November, 2020

      Great idea. I'll see if I can coax something out of it ...

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I don't learn from experience

Image
On the morning of last day of the year I fixed a friend's audio amplifier, a Luxman L30. The right channel had gone. We'd bought the replacement transistors on E-Bay. They arrived on the 30th. I'd previously looked inside the amplifier and thought "buggar me this is going to be awkward. I'm going to have to desolder four heavy duty power duty transistors just to get at the circuit board." But I'd said I'd do it and thought I'd better have a go. I was slightly worried about the job and it even disturbed my sleep. In the holiday morning though I uncharacteristically decided to stop watching TV and get on with it. I found the solution, did the job, and got the amplifier working again. (See the end of this blog entry for details). I was so happy when I heard music coming out of both speakers. The evening of last day of the year. The food was nice, the wine was fine, the company pleasant, but after the first hour I was bored o...
Read more

How to use the wonderful Veho microscope

Image
Though the film "Le Meraviglie" (see previous post) is anything but a wonder the Veho 200x microcsope is a wonder in itself and shows you even more wonders. The Veho USB 200x Discovery VMS-001 Microscope (and how to use it) I'm writing this because I'm a bit annoyed at the documentation of what is really a pretty good instrument for the price (about 40 Euros). I hesitated before buying because of some of the Amazon UK bad reviews. Most of the 1 star reviews were from people having problems with Windows-XP or the Mac. So avoid it if you have one of those old operating systems. I installed it on Windows 7 32 bit and Windows 7 64 bit with no problems (though one 2 star reviews said it was not compatible with these systems). Plug in the microscope to your USB port, some software will automatically run to install some low level drivers, wait till that finishes. Put in the mini-CD in your CD slot. You'll be asked if you want to execute Menu.Exe, click on that opt...
Read more