Eugenio Montale Quotes

There are always pluses and minus to commercialization. It broadcasts something to the masses. So that's the plus. The minus is it may lose some of its meaning if you dilute it.

Art is for everybody.

Hollywood is the kind of place that takes what you do well in one thing and manufactures it so the joy can be taken out of it.

If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.

There is absolutely no point in not being a populist. What I feel emboldened to do is to take something which is a minority interest and make it accessible without dumbing it down. I'm such an enthusiast for peculiar things, things that are perhaps a bit avant-garde, and try and involve everyone.

An art book is a museum without walls.

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.

Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it's not completely an art form. In painting, you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick, or whatever. In sculpture, you can get a rock. Writing, you just need a pencil and paper. Film has been a very elitist medium. It costs so much money.

What artists are doing, and what people who are receiving the arts are doing, is entering into this agreement to occupy a parallel world. The parallel world is ever-expanding. We used to think that it existed only for people who were wealthy, well-born, or educated. It isn't like that.

When the National Theatre was built, it was a public building. If you wander round that building now, there are bits hived off for people who pay more money. That's happening across the arts.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

Pop art is for everyone.

When people go to museums and see a sculpture made out of marble, they appreciate it but it's very doubtful that they will go home and have a slab of marble they can chip away at, but people do have LEGO. I don't have any LEGO specially made for me, all of the shapes, sizes and colours I use are available in stores so that if someone is inspired to create on their own, they can go and buy the very same bricks.

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called ''significant literature'' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

Mainstream success is important - that's probably anathema to an indie publication like Pitchfork, but it's what I believe having experienced it personally.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper. To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.

When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man.

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century exponents of prefabrication were certain it would supplant age-old traditions of individualized design and handcrafted construction. The building art would be revolutionized by freeing designers and construction workers from repetitive tasks, and democratized by making high-style architecture more affordable.

The creatives, they want to connect with people. These artists, the clothing designers, they want to connect with people the same way that music gets to connect with people. But the cost of silk is too expensive. And they won't lower their quality levels. So I can spend $2 million on a record and give it out in a democratic way. They could spend all their time making the greatest dress in the world, and it's just impossible to hand-make that many.

The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.

Learning, to be of much use, must have a tendency to spread itself among the common people.

I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

You can argue about globalization and the many benefits it has had, but also you have to appeal to the mass with everything. The Chinese, the Americans, the Russians... Everything becomes this very bland product, and that's all we're producing at the moment. It's driven by money.