The Line Between The Love And Creation Of Beauty*

Jean-Antoine Watteau - Embarkation for Cythera, 1717

To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god.

Jorge Luis Borges

* The love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Reality Is Not Always Probable - Or, Indeed, Likely*

Fig. 1. Isaac Layman - Sink, 2008


'Few people have the imagination for reality.'

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

* 'Reality is not always probable, or likely.' (Jorge Luis Borges)

The Original Is Always Unfaithful To The Translation*

Fig. 1. Rose Farrell & George Parkin - Ladder (Pulleys, Dislocations and Counterweights, 1997 - 1998)


'In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.'

Jorge Luis Borges

* 'The original is unfaithful to the translation.' (Jorge Luis Borges)

Addendum:

'At this point [the end of the 1980s], we enter perhaps into that third and final moment in the history of appropriation, which we might call banality.

How is this banality to be characterised? As opposed to [the] first two moments of appropriation, it might mark the end of the idea of a history of Australian appropriation, either of writing a stylistic history of appropriation or of understanding the changes in the attitudes towards appropriation as a response to historical forces. Rather, this third stage of appropriation - the simultaneity of the same and the different, the original and the copy, the iconic and the iconoclastic - must be seen as the secret logic underlying the entire history of appropriation, what was at stake in both of those previous two periods. We pass from chronology or style to a logic of appropriation. But at the same time there is no longer anything at stake in appropriation. Even if it was only ever a fabricated or artificial distinction between those first two approaches, there were at least stylistic and emotional attachments to each of them: the first was activist, social, aggressive; the second aloof, personal, withdrawn. Now, neither of these attitudes would be possible any more. There is no longer an aesthetics or politics of appropriation, but only a rhetoric or logic: a logic that is unavoidable, irrefutable, final. We might say that the inescapabilty of appropriation has at least been grasped, the fact that it is the medium in which the practicing artist works; but there is no longer any stylistic or emotional way of making sense of this, no way of troping or transforming it artistically. Appropriation is no longer that which the artist attempts to master, but that which masters the artist; no longer a subject or theme within art, but that to which art itself is subject.'

Rex Butler

Good Books Teach Us To Enjoy Life, Or To Endure It*

Fig. 1. Gerhard Richter - Lesende, 1994


'When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.'

John Berger

* 'Books should teach us to enjoy life, or to endure it.' (Samuel Johnson)

Addendum: Quotes from Anonymous and Larissa (see comments):


'Le métier d'écrire est une violente et presque indestructible passion.'

George Sand

'Les livres ne sont pas des objets comme les autres pour les femmes; depuis l'aube du christianisme jusqu'à aujourd'hui, entre nous et eux, circule un courant chaud, une affinité secrète, une relation étrange et singulière tissée d'interdits, d'appropriations, de réincorporations.'

Laure Adler

'I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.'

Jorge Luis Borges