Douglas Coupland on The Future of Art:
The battle of what it means to be an individual human being has never been so heightened: the ever-escalating clash between modernity and eternity; jihad versus McWorld; heaven versus nothingness; science versus religion; feeling versus thinking, or whatever you want to label it.
“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
– Neil Gaiman
“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”
― Simone Weil
Most people don't run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
— William James
“I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of non-feeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and to think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.”
— The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”
— Edward Said
"Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."
― Annie Dillard
When you say ‘This work has nothing to do with me.’ When you say 'This work is boring/pointless/obscure/elitist etc’ you might be right, because you are looking at a fad, or might be wrong because the work falls so outside of the safety of your own experience that in order to keep your own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting. This denial of imaginitive experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of the daily world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I’ that we are.
A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don’t want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?
― Jeannette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
microcosm [mahy-kruh-koz-uh m]
noun
1. a little world;
2. human beings, humanity, society, or the like, viewed as an epitome or miniature of the world or universe.