#2,952

If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, its history is a colorless narrative.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 471

#2,895

It is fine to demand that the imbecile respect arts, letters, philosophy, the sciences, but let him respect them in silence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,850

The nature of the work of art can depend on social conditions, but its aesthetic quality depends on nothing.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 456

#2,849

In modern art there were numerous trends that exhausted the aesthetic consciousness’s capacity for indignation.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 456

#2,800

I am not so dumb as to deny the indisputable successes of modern art; but when I look at modern art in itself, just as when I look at Egyptian or Chinese art, I feel like I am looking at exotic art.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 449

#2,754

The modern desire to be original makes the mediocre artist believe that simply being different is the secret to being original.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 442

#2,667

Until the end of the 18th century, what man added to nature increased its beauty.
Since then, what he adds destroys it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 430

#2,665

“Modern art” still seems alive because it has not been replaced, not because it has not died.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 430

#2,623

The existence of a work of art demonstrates that the world has meaning.
Even when it does not say what that meaning is.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 424

#2,607

We should only encourage someone to do something that is worth doing because it is worth it.
Goodness for goodness’s sake, truth for truth’s sake, art for art’s sake.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 421

#2,572

The two most insufferable types of rhetoric are religious rhetoric and the rhetoric of art criticism.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 413

#2,542

The civilizing effect of works of art is due less to the aesthetic value than to the ethic of aesthetic work.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 408

#2,541

Arts and letters soon become sterile where the practice of them gives one wealth and the admiration of them prestige.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 408

#2,487

Approaching religion through art is not the caprice of an aesthete: aesthetic experience spontaneously tends to expand into a presentiment of religious experience.
From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 400

#2,462

One soon turns one’s back on the art of the end of this century not because it shocks one with the scandal of what is unusual, but because it overwhelms one with the tediousness of what has already been seen.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 396

#2,409

The evolution of works of art into objects of art and of objects of art into investments or into articles for consumption is a modern phenomenon.
A process that does not evidence a diffusion of the aesthetic, but rather the culmination of contemporary economism.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 389

#2,372

Intelligence is the only art that can survive in any historical climate.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 384

#2,325

Authentic French art and authentic French literature have always existed on the fringe of those “latest Parisian intellectual fashions” which the foreigner so admires.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 377

#2,237

The possibility of selling to the public any man-made object in the name of art is a democratic phenomenon.
Democratic ages, in effect, foment the uncertainty of taste by abolishing every model.
If the most excellent work of art is still possible there, lesser art dies and extravagance abounds.
Where an authority exists, on the other hand, enjoying unfamiliar works is not easy, but taste is infallible when dealing with contemporary art, and lesser art flourishes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 363

#2,113

The greatest disrespect that can be paid to a work of art is to treat it as an expensive object.
No nouveau riche, fortunately, can hang a poem on the walls of his home.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 345