Slmcmahon

“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

“Why incentivize laziness? High-school students shouldn't be discouraged from grappling, sometimes unsuccessfully, with challenging books, pictures, and songs. A really, really good work of art doesn't bow down to you; you step up to it, and it rewards you. In the end, kids faced with what Chaucer actually wrote may still dislike him, and I'm fine with that; they will have earned that opinion rather than had it handed to them. For heaven's sake, it's easy for kids to see themselves and their peers in a rap song. When they can start to see themselves in a 14th-century poem, then they're actually learning something.”
― Jeff Sypeck

“Facts are such horrid things!”
― Jane Austen, Lady Susan

“So, in a way, the color we perceive an object to be is precisely the color it isn’t: that is, the segment of the spectrum that is being reflected away.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color