Curt Barnes Page 2
 


Art leaves nobody out, but it cannot condescend, we have to climb up if we want the extraordinary view.
                                                  -Jeanette Winterson

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
                                                  -Piet Mondrian

All art is in the individual. The greatest masterpieces are not the result of the progress of art. They are expressions of outstanding individuals whose feelings only act as revelations and not as progress for the rest of humanity. . . . The greatest works of art do not make art greater. Art does not succeed itself just as one is not able to transmit beautiful sentiments. . . . There is no history of art-there is the history of artists.
                                                  -Marianne Werefkin



We are, on the whole, a cowardly, homicidal bundle of appetites endowed with seemingly limitless in-stincts of destruction and self-destruction. We are the wasters of the planet and the builders of the death camps. Ninety-nine percent of humanity conducts lives either of severe deprivation-physical, emo-tional, cerebral-or contributes nothing to the sum of insight, of beauty, or moral trial in our civil con-dition. It is a Socrates, a Mozart, a Gauss or a Galileo who, in some degree, compensates for man. It is they who, on fragile occasion, redeem the cruel, imbecile mess which we dignify with the name of history. . . . To grasp, to be able to transmit to others some modest paraphrase of the beauty in a Fermat equation or a Bach canon, to hear the hunter's halloo after truth as Plato heard it, is to give life some excuse. . . . But the fact that such a conviction will strike the vast majority of educated Americans as effete or even (politically, socially) dangerous nonsense, may not be without relevance. . . .