Sublime

His face turned from white to red as he continued: ‘If someone loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself, ‘Somewhere, my flower is there…’ But if the sheep eats the flower, in one moment all his stars will be darke

These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long.

This great artist is a man whose life-time is consumed by struggle: partly against material circumstances, partly against incomprehension, partly against himself.

The life that emerges has not always been (it is coming to be) and will not always be. The experience of beauty is therefore a stab in the heart, and he is seized by the desire to hold on to everything that will not last: “Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.” Seized by this desire, he has the

Over the twentieth century, taste became less a philosophical concept concerning the quality of art than a parallel to industrial-era consumerism, a way to judge what to buy and judge others for what they buy in turn. This phenomenon—conforming too much with popular taste and thus insulating yourself from having a more inspiring, personal encounter

Susan Sontag cited by Miller: “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.... In place of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotics of art.”

As writer Jeffrey Kastner observed: “Attention to the world is the proper vocation not just of the artist but of anyone who imagines it as a place worthy of preservation.”

The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets,