“I think what it means is that central to living, a life that is good is a life that’s forgiving. We’re creatures of contact. Regardless of whether we kiss or we wound, still we must come together.
Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more, since it beats staying dry, but so lonely on shore. So we make ourselves open, while knowing full well it’s essentially saying, please, come pierce my shell.”
-David Rakoff (This American Life)
Kaare Klint, Kunstindustrimuseet Bibliotek
Pullman Palace Car, Barber, c. 1912
“A house is a place where a man expects to be joyous and bored and contented and faced with tragedy and in which he can shut himself away from the world, and when he creates his home he is willing to listen to sober advice about how best to build and how best to decorate. But when he ventures forth either for business or pleasure he moves into a world where he is wafted on swan boats and bedded down in crystal palaces, where he is entertained by women as beautiful as angels (if not so discreet) to the sounds of erotic music and the tinkling of glasses. For the moment he loses himself in the fairyland of the carnival–a prince whose comfort is the first concern of a retinue of servants, and whose eye is filled with riches by scores of artists. In such surroundings and in such delights what matters it to him whether what he beholds is ‘tasteful’?”
-Russel Lynes (The Tastemakers, 96)
Eva Hesse, 1969
“Or it can go the other way round. The original idea can just be intuitive, right? So that it is just an emotional thing. Then you calculate from there and follow through without any divergency.”
-Eva Hesse (Eva Hesse, 9)
“I am alone with this thing, and it is up to me to evaluate it in the absence of available standards. The value which I shall put on this painting tests my personal courage….It is a kind of self-analysis that a new image can throw you into and for which I am grateful.”
-L.Steinberg (“Other Criteria”)
no way.
László Moholy-Nagy, Untitled (Muliple Portrait), c. 1927
Only now and then does one find really “good” photographs among the millions which appear in illustrated papers and books. What is remarkable in this end at the same time serves as a proof is that (after a fairly long visual culture) we always infallibly and with sure instinct discover the “good” photos, quite apart from the novelty or unfamiliarity of the thematic content.
-László Moholy-Nagy (Painting, Photography, Film, 113)
