"Ripped from the Headlines"

Emer Rooney, 33, on the last day of a visit from Ireland, took pictures of the scene. She said that despite the shooting, she had never felt unsafe in New York, noting the presence of “all the police officers.” She cited the shooting, in fact, as one of the more exciting moments of her trip — right up there, she said, with recovering lost luggage at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and getting tickets to “Wicked.”


James Barron, ["In Holiday Crush, a Fatal Shootout in Times Sq.", The New York Times, December 11, 2009]

Adorno: Perennial Fashion-Jazz

"Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with 'dirty notes' for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste-products as its aberrant influence grows."


Theodor W. Adorno [Perennial Fashion-Jazz, 1953]

Matthew Collings on Tracey Emin's "My Bed"

"What is it? A manufactured saintly relic: the great power it memorializes or stands for is Saint Pain, Saint Class, Saint Gender, Saint Femininity, Saint Abjection, Saint Ethnicity (English mother, Turkish father), and, of course, Saint Victim. Her devil muses are Drunk, Raped, and Can't Spell."

Matthew Collings ["God Save the Queen," Modern Painters, November 2008]

Mary Magdalene, Seductive Sinner/Repenter

"Every genuine work of art may have a good moral drawn from it, but, of course, in doing so much depends on interpretation and on him who draws the moral. Thus one may hear the most immoral representations defended by saying we must know evil, or sin, in order to act morally; and, conversely, it has been said that the portrayal of Mary Magdalene, the beautiful sinner who afterwards repented, has seduced many into sin, because art makes it looks so beautiful to repent, and you must sin before you can repent."


G.W.F. Hegel [Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 1820s]

Urs Fischer's "Holes"

"When it comes to installation art, he is prone to an efficient form of spectacle: he simply has very large holes cut or dug in the walls or floors of galleries, museums and the occasional art fair booth, usually to startlingly beautiful effect. Implicitly Duchampian yet marvelously experiential, these pieces have seemed to signal the end of installation art, like monochrome paintings sometimes seem to forewarn the end of painting. Add nothing, just use the space and the architecture, dummy."


Roberta Smith ["Exploration of Space," The New York Times, October 29, 2009]

Fred Asparagus

"Is Fred Asparagus the only guy who is long and green and dances beautifully?"


Jill Johnston, "Holy Christometer" [The Village Voice, December 19, 1968]

An errant muse

"I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time."


John Updike

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon

Though a bit unorthodox, this comes from Wikipedia, :

"Snowdon did not read books and had no intellectual interests, but Margaret did; Snowdon therefore took to leaving lists between the pages for her to find, of 'things I hate about you.' According to biographers Sarah Bradford and Anne de Courcy, one note read: 'You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you.'"

The Mind's Morning Dew

"In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty is fresh upon all the objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things?"


Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1759

Reality found in experience, not art

Bending the rules on this one (it's longer than three sentences):

"When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get onto the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn't know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art."


Tony Smith