Art Is Too Important to Love

Thinking, like life, builds accidentally.

What happens in art doesn’t need you.

(But we have no hope of testing it observationally.)

If a description fits everyone, it’s not much of a description. This is a problem people who would categorize movements and periods in art continually face.

When I see someone write about a way an artist or some artists work I usually have the reaction that it is in some ways an attractive proposition, but that its proposed application to reality is pure speculation. I also feel this way when reading some poems.

Art is always a disappointment, because, in the end, it’s just people talking. Perhaps this is why people often like the say that art is like money or religion.

Artists are more afraid of circus clowns than are non-artists.

“Over time, only the best models survive,” only works in a generally horizontal community. I know of nowhere in history where a generally horizontal community has existed.

Art is a system that develops chaos. People tend to know this intuitively and then proclaim or deny art because of it.

Could there be an art as without mind as math is?

The genius is the first one to make a joke about a tragedy when it’s not too soon.

People often approach others with “how are they wrong?” when we all know that nearly all positions have a point, so that a mindset of “where are they right?” is just as valid, and a more profitable position from which to begin.

That said, sometimes you have to fight.

One of the many tricky parts of art is to be able to lose sight of your objectives while still working toward them. Which is first, to have objectives, and second, to not have objectives.

Between friend and enemy, the stranger must be restored to conceptual order. And what if we’re braced with the new, then? The perfect stranger? What if it’s unresolvable?

In art, one must never claim that what one is doing is possible.

There are ways of looking at art that are compatible, or sympathetic with each other, ways that are neutral with each other, and ways that are incompatible rivals.

How can art approach fundamental meaning when, in our daily lives, fundamental meaning continually recedes? Encounters with meaning are inevitable. But how one chooses one’s way makes all the difference.

The general population’s lack of knowledge of contemporary poetry removes contemporary poetry from its context. The context no longer generally understands itself in the poem.

When one does criticism, marking themes, value, intentions-outcomes, achievement, what has one accomplished? Is there a way of doing this that keeps the text in play?

I, too, wish John Ashbery would win the Nobel Prize.

Binding ourselves to genres as if they were closeable yields absurdity, absurd distinctions. Yet, yielding ourselves to the indefinability of genres leaves us without a stage from which to speak.

Either / Or! It’s difficult for anything to follow that without falling into fallacy.

Cleaning a chicken doesn’t mean giving it a bath.

As an artist, there are always places you won’t go, places you can’t go. That doesn’t mean art can’t. just that you can’t.

A car promises you there is a road.

Art is not kind to experts.

That’s just it. There is no mold. That is why the definition of what we’re doing will always recede. Each new art object is part of the syntax. “Watch the other children and you’ll know what to do” is only a start.

The end of a method: we can no longer envision, but invention’s easy.

Imagine that these are all brand new words.

Good luck.