Decadent Art Quotes

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. ~ Jennifer Birkett

Here, in Lorrain's poisoned little jewel of a tale ("The Man Who Made Wax Heads") the consummate achievement of decadent art is caught in miniature. The genius of the artist entangles perpetrators and victims in a sticky web of perverse delights, in which exploitation becomes collusion, the ripples of guilt spread outward, and the real criminal slips away. In the end, responsibility is lodged firmly with the consumer, forced – he must confess – by his own perverse desires, to buy into the values of this particularly black market. ~ Jennifer Birkett

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer ~ Alfred De Musset

Ensor sees with his imagination, but his vision is perfectly accurate, of an almost geometric precision. He is one of the very few who can really see. Like you, he has an obsession with masks; he is a seer as you and I are. The common herd, of course thinks that he is mad.
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You shall see what sort of man Ensor is, and what a marvellous insight he has into the invisible realm where our vices are created ... those vices for which our faces make masks. ~ Jean Lorrain

It is a sort of quasi-monastic diabolical vision. In a landscape populated with larvae - flowing and undulating larvae called forth like a cascade of leeches by tolling bells - three female figures rise up phantasmally, enshrouded with gauze like Spanish madonnas. They are the 'three brides': the bride of Heaven, the bride of the Earth and the bride of Hell...

The bride of Hell, with her two serpents writhing about her temples to hold her veil in place, has the most attractive mask: the most profound eyes, the most vertiginous smile that one could ever see.

If she existed, how I would love that woman! I feel that if that smile and those eyes were in my life they would be all the cure I need!

I could never tire of the study and contemplation of that hallucinatory visage.

"The Three Brides" is very peculiar in its detail and composition. It is the whimsy of a dream rendered with astonishing fastidiousness: the delusion of an opium-smoker composed in the style of Holbein. ~ Jean Lorrain

At issue for Peladan is the potency of the visual image: art's ability to construct images for viewing that can mobilize, concentrate and redirect instinctive responses. He brings out into the open the recognition underlying all decadent art; that is, the political function of the fascinated gaze. ~ Jennifer Birkett

You never know about the art world because it's a matter of opinion. If you look at old art like Rembrandt and Vermeer, it's not completely a matter of opinion. The pictures confront you, and you see exactly what it is. In modern art, a lot of it is suggestive, and it becomes a matter of opinion. ~ Peter Saul

I think having a dispassionate eye is a good way of making art. When you don't know the structures of a place, you are unencumbered. ~ Rory Kinnear

Have I ever written anything that has really changed something? What I believe is that you can't change anything without using art. I believe that the drops wear away the stone. I try to be part of that army. ~ Henning Mankell

I always knew that I had to direct. That was something I'd wanted to do. Finally, I was just looking at the situation and I said, "I wanna document hip-hop, as an art form, seeing how a lot of people don't take it seriously." ~ Ice-T

To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity. ~ Dan Simmons

It is with artworks as it is with wine: it is much better when we do not need either one, when we stick with water, and when out of our own inner fire, the inner sweetness of our own soul, we turn the water over and over again into wine ourselves. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be. ~ Gertrude Stein

The genius of art finds sanctuary among children and madmen to survive.That is who we are. ~ Marilyn Manson

I'm overflowing with stories, delighted and quite mad with the beauty and tragedy of them. ~ Katharine Susannah Prichard

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. ~ Oscar Wilde

I've never been so conflicted in my life. My body is screaming yes, but my heart is crying no. My fingers itch to touch him and my lips part to meet him but my mind won't shut up long enough to let me give in. ~ Ellie Messe

[Washington, DC] feels like you're watching performance art. A lot of the time. I don't believe them, I don't believe what they say, I don't think they're being absolutely sincere. I think it's performance art. And most of them are bad actors. ~ Kevin Spacey

I can't think of a better rationale to create a work of art. I don't care what form one's art takes, it has to be an attempt to leave the world a better place than it was before we got here or it's not doing its job. And I don't mean just making things that are pretty. ~ Charles De Lint

No art ever came out of not risking your neck. ~ Eudora Welty

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. ~ Clive Bell

To practice Zen or the Martial Arts, you must live intensely, wholeheartedly, without reserve - as if you might die in the next instant ~ Taisen Deshimaru

I was bringing the whole music, hip-hop, art, break dancing and urban cultural thing to the downtown table. ~ Fab Five Freddy

Nothing will enrich your life as much as the appreciation of art. If you want to 'Live Rich', you have to - absolutely have to - include art in your life. ~ Mark M. Ford

You took a pretty picture and you smashed it into bits, sank me into blackness and you sealed it with a kiss. ~ Madonna Ciccone

My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement. It has taken me long years to find even one absolutely true movement. ~ Isadora Duncan

In a relationship, when does the art of compromise become compromising? ~ Sarah Jessica Parker

If they brought you here,They'll put you to work. THEY'RE not readyto kill you YET. ~ Art Spiegelman

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

You know that bad people can make great art, don't you?'Said Annie.
'Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.'
'Dickens wasn't nice to his wife.'
'Dickens didn't make a memoir called I'm Nice to My Wife. ~ Nick Hornby

Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must. ~ Seth Godin

Inspire me with love for my art and for thy creatures. In the sufferer let me see only the human being. ~ Maimonides

Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. ~ Childe Hassam

We have lost the art of sharing and caring. ~ Hun Sen

Most artists are surrealists ... always dreaming something and then they paint it. ~ Dong Kingman

Listen! Here's all you need to know to become enlightened: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what's true until you know. That's it. That's the whole deal; a complete teaching of enlightenment, a complete practice. If you ever have any questions or problems - no matter what the question or problem is - the answer is always exactly the same: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what's true until you know. In other words, go jump off a cliff. Don't go near the cliff and contemplate jumping off. Don't read a book about jumping off. Don't study the art and science of jumping off. Don't join a support group for jumping off. Don't write poems about jumping off. Don't kiss the ass of someone else who jumped off. Just jump. ~ Jed McKenna

Because eventually, no matter what the circumstances, he would see the real me. Josh is a beautiful, messy, passionate work of art, and I'm ... a blank canvas. There's nothing here to love. ~ Stephanie Perkins

Do I smell like wild places, still?"
Sergei laughed softly and ruffled his hair. "I'd have to compare. And monitor that. Refine my assessment over the next years ... "
"Ranch has plenty of spare dung. I'll be sure to roll in it regularly." Teeth scraped his arm, nipped his skin gently.
"I always knew the Alliance was decadent. I intend to see just how decadent. ~ Rhi Etzweiler

Fight valiantly to-day; and yet I do thee wrong to mind thee of it, for thou art framed of the firm truth of valor. ~ William Shakespeare

I just love entertaining. I will do anything - stand-up comedy, video games, fencing, internet shorts - I just want to keep being lucky enough to entertain people anyway I can. I try never to limit my art to a medium. ~ Matthew Gray Gubler

People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection. ~ Amitav Ghosh

I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others' paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.

A thread now most often means a line of conversation via e-mail or other electronic means, but thread must have been an even more compelling metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women's work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of fiber into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale.

Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words becoming stories. The fairy-tale heroines spin cobwebs, straw, nettles into whatever is necessary to survive. Scheherazade forestalls her death by telling a story that is like a thre ~ Rebecca Solnit

I'm constantly exposing myself to art and that inspires me. ~ Dominic Monaghan

The good things in life-happiness, purpose, contentment, companionship, beauty, and love-have been there all along. We don't need to earn them. Good food, friends, art, warmth, worth-these are the things we have already. We just need to choose them as our lives. ~ John Leland

Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!
to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations?
and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven? ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Earth has nothing more tender than a woman's heart when it is the abode of piety. ~ Martin Luther

A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity ... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it. ~ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Artists don't think outside the box, because outside the box there's a vacumm. Outside the box there are no rules, there is no reality. You have nothing to interact with, nothing to work against. If you set out to do something way outside the box (designing a time machine, or using liquid nitrogen to freeze Niagara Falls), then you'll never be able to do the real work of art. You can't ship if you're far outside the box.
Artists think along the edges of the box, because that's where things get done. That's where the audience is, that's where the means of production are available, and that's where you can make impact. ~ Seth Godin

Deep down everyone is really good. It's just that sometimes people forget that they are that good. ~ Art Hochberg

The power of music feels like taking a a nice brake from this busy world ~ Millie DeWitt

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me. ~ Clint Eastwood