Aesthetic Boundaries Quotes

It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly.

It's so difficult to write good music. It's also really difficult to think about how to do it without violating the sanctity of the fourth wall.

Style is based on limitations.

The orbit of human vision has widened and art has annexed fresh territories that were formerly denied to it.

I've come up with another formulation about style: that it's essentially a manifestation of a certain habitual set of limitations. It's what a composer does NOT do that defines a style.

As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting.

No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

It has to be absolutely believable. It's also going between images and scenes with nudity and sexuality that would be seen, in conventional terms, as kind of sexually exciting. It's up against things that are much more medical and gynecological, and notoriously we, as a culture and a society, have some issues with that kind of thing.

There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.

I've been criticized by my generation, artists from the '70s - and there's nothing more tragic than artists from the '70s still doing art from the '70s - because I blur all these borders between fashion and pop.

I think that we'll see the concept of 'genre' continue to die a slow and painful death.

Ralph Ellison's essays were models for me when I began my life as a critic. Slipping cultural yokes and violating aesthetic boundaries, he made criticism high-stakes work, especially for a black critic.

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?.