

Charles Jenks on Modernism, Late-Modernism and Post-Modernism.
“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
“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
“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
“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.”
“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.”
Matthew Herbert (2005)
“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