Sebastian Smee > Quotes

“IF THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL difference between rivalry in the modern era and rivalry in earlier epochs, as I believe there is, it is that in the modern era artists developed a wholly different conception of greatness. It was a notion based not on the old, established conventions of mastering and extending a pictorial tradition, but on the urge to be radically, disruptively original. Where did this urge come from? It was a response, most basically, to the new conditions of life—to a sense that modern, industrialized, urban society, although in some ways representing a pinnacle of Western civilization, had also foreclosed on certain human possibilities. Modernity, many began to feel, had shut off the possibility of forging a deeper connection with nature and with the riches of spiritual and imaginative life. The world, as Max Weber wrote, had become disenchanted. Hence”
― Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

“A whole language, according to UNESCO, disappears on average every two weeks.”
― Sebastian Smee

“In these now canonical pieces, Greenberg, following Trotsky, had insisted on the need for avant-garde art to retain its independence not only from bourgeois values, but also from explicitly leftist habits of thought: Only by retaining total independence, believed Greenberg, could art offer effective resistance to forces of standardization and control in society at large. To maintain this autonomy, he argued, progressive art had to burn away everything that was incidental to the medium itself. That meant ridding painting of its traditional preoccupation with creating illusions of three-dimensionality and depth. And it meant the end of all other gambits that were in less-than-total accord with the innate properties of the medium. The artwork, he believed, must be made to surrender to “the resistance of the medium.” To”
― Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

“We are told we are social creatures, and god knows it’s true. But we don’t have to be introverts to grasp how disorienting and exhausting – and ultimately deforming of who we feel ourselves to be – all this continuous relating to other people can be.”
― Sebastian Smee, Net Loss: The Inner Life in the Digital Age

“All great paintings have an aura, which derives, in part, from their singularity.”
― Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

“with a painted triptych he called Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.”
― Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

“What we know about an artist’s life shouldn’t be recruited to secure us against what is wild and unknown in his or her art. Art — and modern art in particular — can be puzzling, but that doesn’t mean we have to solve it. The will to “solve” or even “understand” art is not the only — and not the best — form of attention we can pay it.”
― Sebastian Smee

“And yet the idea that a person’s character and social station could be read in his or her face had greater currency than ever. There were social and political reasons for this. Since the 1789 revolution, social hierarchies in France had undergone seventy years of unstinting, often violent upheaval. With the deck of class violently shuffled by a series of political disruptions, and industry rapidly changing the face of the city, fears of conspiracy and criminality were rife among the bourgeoisie and the upper classes. Not even fashion and dress brought clarity to the situation, since people could no longer be depended upon to dress in ways that reflected their social standing. Instead—and increasingly—people’s clothes expressed their social aspirations. Those whose status had once been relatively settled wanted reassurance. They needed to feel the city was legible, knowable, and at least potentially under control. (It’s not by accident that the genre of the detective novel, in which a hero endowed with preternatural abilities at reading clues solves puzzling crimes, emerged at the same time.) In these new, unstable social circumstances (which are a large part of what we mean by modernity), the pseudoscience of physiognomy was immensely appealing.”
― Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

“speed and discontinuity of these modern media, and especially by the”
― Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

“Art — and modern art in particular — can be puzzling, but that doesn’t mean we have to solve it. The will to “solve” or even “understand” art is not the only — and not the best — form of attention we can pay it.”
― Sebastian Smee