Category: quotes
Eric McLuhan: Understanding Media
Modern, Late-Modern, Post-Modern
Charles Jenks on Modernism, Late-Modernism and Post-Modernism.
R. Buckminster Fuller
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
Lidia Yuknavitch
“Art gave me something to believe in at all the times in my life when I felt life wasn’t worth living. Art also gives a person experiencing pain and the will toward self-destruction a viable option: self-expression. And art helps us bear the brutality in the world—because it cannot be burned or buried or bombed away. Someone will always make more of it. Art is an antidote for loneliness as well. Not all of us are well-adjusted and excellent at being with people. And yet we love our fellow mammals. Art gives us something to do with the love and the loneliness when we falter at life.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch
Art and Knowledge
“If the artworld was primarily concerned with knowledge and knowledge acquisition surely this would be clearly evident in its discourse. To insist that this is the proper function of the artworld is to accuse the community of longstanding and persistent incompetence.”
— Scrivener, 2002
Arte & Progreso
“El arte no es progreso y esa es su virtud. El progreso se mide por alcances económicos, sociales y políticos, es un avance que proyecta poder, elimina al pasado e invade el futuro. El ritmo del progreso es frenético, devastador, erige su propio altar para adorarse. El arte utiliza el tiempo en un gesto, una palabra, un color, en contemplación o en nada. La presión que el arte sufre para ser “actual y con las preocupaciones de nuestro tiempo” ha desvirtuado su trayecto, lo conduce a los objetivos redituables del progreso. El arte es y debe ser antiproductivo, antiprogresista y antiactual.”
Ambient
“It’s interesting what part of ambient they took as being the center of it. For me, the central idea was about music as a place you go to. Not a narrative, not a sequence that has some sort of teleological direction to it—verse, chorus, this, that, and the other. It’s really based on abstract expressionism: Instead of the picture being a structured perspective, where your eye is expected to go in certain directions, it’s a field, and you wander sonically over the field. And it’s a field that is deliberately devoid of personalities, because if there’s a personality there, that’s who you’ll follow. So there’s not somebody in that field leading you around; you find your own way.”
Manifesto for making music
- The use of sounds that exist already is not allowed. Subject to article 2. In particular:
- No drum machines.
- No synthesizers.
- No presets.
- Only sounds that are generated at the start of the compositional process or taken from the artist’s own previously unused archive are available for sampling.
- The sampling of other people’s music is strictly forbidden.
- No replication of traditional acoustic instruments is allowed where the financial and physical possibility of using the real ones exists.
- The inclusion, development, propagation, existence, replication, acknowledgement, rights, patterns and beauty of what are commonly known as accidents, is encouraged. Furthermore, they have equal rights within the composition as deliberate, conscious, or premeditated compositional actions or decisions.
- The mixing desk is not to be reset before the start of a new track in order to apply a random eq and fx setting across the new sounds. Once the ordering and recording of new music has begun, the desk may be used as normal.
- All fx settings must be edited: no factory preset or pre-programmed patches are allowed.
- Samples themselves are not to be truncated from the rear. Revealing parts of the recording are invariably stored there.
- A notation of sounds used to be taken and made public.
- A list of technical equipment used to be made public.
- Optional: Remixes should be completed using only the sounds provided by the original artist.
Matthew Herbert (2005)
James Baldwin
“The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society — the politicians, legislators, educators, and scientists — by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being. Society must accept some things as real; but he must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen. A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven. One cannot possibly build a school, teach a child, or drive a car without taking some things for granted. The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”
— James Baldwin
Ellsworth Kelly
“Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all ‘meaning’ of the thing seen. Then only, could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.”
Timothy Morton
“Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.”