Reprise #2: But, After We've Smoked Another Silence

Fig. Nan Goldin - Nan and Brian in Bed, NYC, 1983

'To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.'

Quentin Crisp

Reprise #1: Evicting The Soft Embalmer Of The Night

Fig. 1. Gustav Klimt - Danae, 1907-08


'The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.'

Gustav Klimt

Finally, There Is Only A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction*

Fig. 1. Vivienne Shark LeWitt - Diners Club, 1992

'A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.'

Lucian Freud

* 'No artist is pleased. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.' (Martha Graham)

Addendum: The Sunday Six

Six different translations of the opening lines of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

1. It is in the nature of every advance, that it appears much greater than it actually is. (Malcolm, 1984)

2. It is in the nature of all progress, that it looks much greater than it really is. (Baker and Hacker, 1980)

3. The thing about progress is that it appears much greater than it actually is. (Barker, 1985)

4. In general, it is characteristic of progress that it looks much bigger that it really is. (Spielberg, 1978)

5. It is a thing about progress: it generally looks bigger than it really is. (von Wright, 1982)

6. Motto: 'Anyway, the thing about progress is that it looks much greater than it really is.' (Stern, 2004)

Not Many Things Come With A 500-Year Guarantee

Fig. 1. A photograph of Michelangelo’s Pietà by Aurelio Amendola from the book Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano (2008)

'Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.'

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simon

Four Blind Ears: Or, The Art Of Listening To Pictures

Fig. 1. Alessandra Sanguinetti - Time Flies (2005)


'What the picture tells me is "itself" - I should like to say. That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its forms and colours.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't Always Apologise For Talking About Painting*

Fig 1. Theo van Doesburg - Composition VIII (The Cow), c. 1918


'To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.'

Paul Valery

* 'We must always apologize for talking painting.' (Paul Valery)

I Had A Dream, And In My Dream History Came True

Fig. 1. François Morellet - Néons avec programmation aléatoire poétique-géométrique, 1967


'In its traditional form, history proper was concerned to define relations (of simple causality, of circular determination, of antagonism, of expression) between facts or dated events: the series being known, it was simply a question of defining the position of each element in relation to the other elements in the series. [But] the problem now is to constitute series: to define the elements proper to each series, to formulate its laws, thus constituting the series of series, of "tables." ... Thus, in the place of the continuous chronology of reason, which was invariably traced back to some inaccessible origin, there have appeared scales that are sometimes very brief, distinct from one another, irreducible to a single law, scales that bear a type of history peculiar to each one, and which cannot be reduced to the general model of a consciousness that acquires, progresses, and remembers.'

Michel Foucault