In aesthetics, “Huh? Wow!” is preferable to “Wow! Huh?”

 ---Jackson Arn, quoting Ed Ruscha, in God’s-Eye Views: Aerial Photography in the Southwest, Art in America, Nov 2022

In context

To put it succinctly: In aesthetics, “Huh? Wow!” is preferable to “Wow! Huh?” This rule, courtesy of Ed Ruscha, goes some way toward explaining why SAP [Southwestern aerial photography] has been a source of inspiration for artists as different as Trevor Paglen, Robert Smithson, Ansel Adams, Emmet Gowin, David Maisel, and—if we’re counting his shots of Los Angeles parking lots—Ruscha himself. 

The fear of machines outsmarting us, ...—I don’t think that’s new

--- Urs Fischer, in conversation with Natasha Stagg, Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2018

From the interview:

Natasha Stagg There does seem to be a common fear of technology and machine learning, though—that it will outsmart you eventually.

Urs Fischer Yeah, good. I mean, we’re not that smart to begin with.

NS But we’re creating the machine, so we don’t want to be outsmarted by it.

UF Our species creates all sorts of things, but look at what else we do: we tap into natural resources like there’s no tomorrow, knowing it’s bad for us as a species and for the rest of life on this planet. But we do it with very elaborate, smart machines. . . . There are a lot of things we do that we don’t want to talk about because we don’t like the solutions. We procreate like crazy, creating more of us, caring about the ones close to us but not about a bigger picture. We just mess everything up. How smart are we? I tend to think that we’re idiots. We’re smart enough to do things but too dumb to understand what we do. The fear of machines outsmarting us, the feeling, the emotional side of this—I don’t think that’s new. The world has always been ending. The apocalypse is as old as history, just with different ingredients.

IMHO, the world has always been ending because our lives are always ending; the apocalypse is personal before it’s collective. 

I’m willing to believe that the fear of machines outsmarting us isn’t new either, since it’s human to fear being outsmarted, primarily by other humans and then by anything else that our hyper-active innate agency detectors identify. If the fear is perennial, presumably the optimism is, too.

Zeus does not arrive at decisions which he then enacts in the mortal world; rather, human events are themselves an enactment of divine will

--- Harold Bloom. Quote taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus, which seems to be citing Bloom's Major Dramatists: Aeschylus (2002), p. 14-15. (I wasn't able to verify the reference.)

Quote in context (taken from the Wikipedia article):

Much critical attention has been paid to the question of theodicy in Aeschylus. For generations, scholars warred incessantly over 'the justice of Zeus,' unintentionally blurring it with a monotheism imported from Judeo-Christian thought. The playwright undoubtedly had religious concerns; for instance, Jacqueline de Romilly suggests that his treatment of time flows directly out of his belief in divine justice. But it would be an error to think of Aeschylus as sermonizing. His Zeus does not arrive at decisions which he then enacts in the mortal world; rather, human events are themselves an enactment of divine will.

our failure is to form habits

--- Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Conclusion (1st ed. 1873)

In context

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.

We live by admiration, hope and love

--- William Wordsworth, quoted by Carleton Noyes in the final paragraph of The Gate of Appreciation: Studies in the Relation of Art to Life, 1907 (on gutenberg.org)


From Noyes:

Art is within the range of every man who holds himself open to its appeal. But art is not the final thing. It is a means to an end; its end is personality. There are exalted moments in the experience of us all which we feel to be finer than any art. Then we do not need to turn to painting, music, literature, for our satisfaction. We are living. Art is aid and inspiration, but its fulfillment and end is life.

"We live," says Wordsworth, "by admiration, hope, and love." Admiration is wonder and worship, a sense of the mystery and the beauty of life as we know it now, and thankfulness for it, and joy. Hope is the vision of things to be. And love is the supreme enfolding unity that makes all one. Art is life at its best, but life is the greatest of the arts,--life harmonious, deep in feeling, big in sympathy, the life that is appreciation, responsiveness, and love.

Art jewellery is "buying a bit of the artist's brain"

--- The Economist in a review built around a show of contemporary jewellery at the Saatchi Gallery

In context:

This is jewellery offering a very different expression of identity. The wearer of such pieces challenges preconceived notions. It can include a whiff of intellectual snobbery, as the wearer can be seen as “buying a bit of the artist’s brain”.

art never improves, but ... the material of art is never quite the same

--- T S Eliot, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent, suggested by Bret Battey a propos the previous Basho quote

"[The artist] must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe - the mind of his own country - a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind - is a mind which changes... That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the different between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show."