“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,—only the authentic utterances of the oracle;— all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and Shakespeare’s.”
“1934-35: There has likely been no more serious lapse of judgment on the part of the European cultural intelligentsia and artistic avant-garde, including among the political Left, than the reception paid Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Easily the most renown and lauded of propaganda films in history, it is also one so influential in terms of cinematic technique and formal organization, that its innovations can still be seen in film, video, even commercial advertising today. For such aesthetic excellence, the cultural establishment accorded Triumph of the Will lavish praise and the top honors of the day—including the 1935 Venice Biennale gold medal and the 1937 Grand Prix at the Paris World Exhibition. It has been said that the aura of aesthetic grandeur which Riefenstahl projected onto the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, and of Hitler’s personal charisma as a leader, was so influential, she was in great degree responsible not only for the selling of the Third Reich to the German people, but in winning for it allies and admirers around the world.”
— Diego Rivera at MoMA Makes Us Ask, What Happened to the Radical Left in Art? - The Huffington Post
“1942-45: The havoc unleashed in the Second World War overshadows all intellectual and artistic production. The Surrealists who sought asylum in New York have a major impact on Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Robert Mothewell and Robert Matta. The bombing of Europe and the Pacific nations, the Holocaust, the nuclear destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—in short the virtual devastation of the centers of the civilized world—set off an angst that permeates the global intellgentsia and informs the rise of philosophical Existentialism. Writers and artists in all media question human existence while seeking to purge humanity of the notions of essence that spur great nations and civilizations to adopt the conceit of their superiority over less powerful societies. In visual art, this philosphy informs Abstract Expressionism in its rejection of the aesthetics of the great masterpieces of art for having failed to tame the barbarism of civilization. By taking art back to its origins of making primordial and direct marks on a surface—the kind of art which the most primitive of humans made to record their existence—artists now sought to purge civilization of its warrior impulse.”
— Diego Rivera at MoMA Makes Us Ask, What Happened to the Radical Left in Art? - The Huffington Post
“today’s political iconoclasts can become tomorrow’s blue chip investments.”
“Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and Minimalism in the 1960s are especially susceptible to being “co-opted” by both Left and Right because of their visually apolitical or politically ambiguous formalism — the empty slate to be written on at will by political ideologists. As the Culture Wars and the ever-spiraling prices of blue-chip art entrench the Professional Left of universities and journalism against the Corporate Sponsorship of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art, the three art movements become identified with mainstream patronage. By the late 1960s, all three are largely abandoned by the Left in the U.S., in favor of Conceptual and Performance Art.”
— Political Art Timeline, 1945-1966: Postwar Art of the Left - The Huffington Post
“1945: With the Pacific war ended, Japanese officials begin a program of whitewashing Japan’s military and administrative actions during the war. One of those actions is to permanently erase masterpieces of Army propaganda from public memory. We to this day still don’t know the extent of the propaganda produced by the Great Japan Army Painters’ Association, the war effort’s employment of several hundred artists to glorify the Army and the Emperor before citizens and captives alike. We have no idea how many artworks were destroyed by the Japanese to hide their atrocities. We only know that 153 war paintings that had been confiscated by the US occupying forces remain in storage in Japan’s national museum. To this day, successive prime ministers have kept the paintings from being shown for fear of offending the neighboring nations depicted”
— Political Art Timeline, 1945-1966: Postwar Art of the Left - The Huffington Post
“He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world’s eye.”
“. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/17/us-officials-iran-sanctions-military-action
Get ready for it.
Shakespeares Sonette: Sonnet 71 (by AllmuthAndorsch)
Bob Wilsons Interpretation von Shakespeares Sonnetten (by schollek)
