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

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