Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
Terry EagletonRelated topics
affair art attract capitalist delight history idea literature material sheer something state subversive utility pointlessness pay-offRelated quotes
A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person's being.... It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.
Jean Dubuffet
good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.
H. P. Lovecraft
Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature -- subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasurers, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today. . . . The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.
William Osler
I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love. It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigor of the earlier world.
William Morris
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
Willa Cather
