“At one time, irony served to challenge the establishment; now it is the establishment. The art of irony has turned into ironic art. Irony for irony’s sake. A smart aleck making bomb noises in front of a city in ruins. But irony without a purpose enables cynicism. It stops at disavowal and destruction, fearing strong conviction is a mark of simplicity and delusion.”
“One of the reasons we admire or like art, if we do, is that it reopens us in some sense—as Kafka wrote in a letter, art breaks the sea that’s frozen inside us.”
“We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We’re kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”
-Roger Ebert
Film Still: The Deer Hunter. Dir. Michael Cimino (1978)
self, art and buddhism in the la review of books
“If you’ve ever sat through a silent 10-day meditation retreat, you know the spectacle that is the human mind — the monkey mind (as the Buddhists call it), the clamoring mind; the memories rising, relentlessly, one after another, the sheer acrobatics of thinking. According to certain meditation practices, samsara is the story we create of experience. It is the mechanism of the mind that interprets sensation and turns it into narrative. But we suffer, the thinking goes, because we react to sensation based on these stories. One teacher describes samsara, first, as a line in the sand — erased easily by the rising tide. The danger, he warns, is that over time such lines become as permanent as grooves etched into stone. It’s not just that our stories lack flexibility or nuance, but that they ultimately create a phantom self — a limiting and faulty version of who we are based on past events, with an ego that eclipses our ability to observe the world in the present moment. This, according to the ancients, is the cause of our misery; the alternative, however — the dissolution of ego — is a threatening paradigm for any person to consider, let alone one who has devoted her life to art.”
david byrne on the struggle of making art in nyc in the guardian
“The city is a body and a mind – a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information. Knowledge and creativity are resources. If the physical (and financial) parts are functional, then the flow of ideas, creativity and information are facilitated. The city is a fountain that never stops: it generates its energy from the human interactions that take place in it. Unfortunately, we’re getting to a point where many of New York’s citizens have been excluded from this equation for too long.”
why our brain responds to psychologically astute art in the nyt
“So how does our brain respond to portraiture? As we look at a portrait, our brain calls on several interacting systems to analyze contours, form a representation of the face and of the body, analyze the body’s motion, experience emotion, and perhaps, empathy. Along with these instantaneous responses, we form a theory of the subject’s state of mind.”
oscar kokoschka, bessie bruce, 1910
art, darwin and evolutionary psychology in the new republic
“Art, then, can be defined as the calisthenics of pattern-finding…(Boyd) is proposing a direct link between art and fitness: the more art we experience, the more likely we are to survive and to reproduce. Art, in this model, is like a gym in which ‘we incrementally fine-tune our neural wiring through our repeated and focused engagement in each of the arts.’”
Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water, 2002
psychology, literature and nabokov in the american scholar
“Literature’s aims differ considerably from those of research psychology. Nevertheless literature draws on human intuitive psychology (itself also a subject in recent psychology) and exercises our psychological capacities. Literature aims to understand human minds only to the degree it seeks to move human minds. It may move readers’ minds, in part, by showing with new accuracy or vividness, or at least with fresh particulars, how fictional minds move, and by showing in new ways how freely readers’ minds can move, given the right prompts. Psychology also wants to understand minds, both simply for the satisfaction of knowing and also to make the most of them, to limit mental damage or to extend mental benefits. It uses the experimental method. We can also see fictions as thought experiments, experiments about how characters feel, think, and behave, and about how readers feel, think, and behave, and how they can learn to think more imaginatively, feel more sympathetically, act more sensitively.”
