Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
Walter BenjaminRead
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
Interpretation
Critics should create memorable phrases that reflect deep ideas without misrepresenting them.
Walter Benjamin highlights the responsibility of critics to encapsulate complex ideas into impactful slogans. He warns against superficial criticism that panders to trends rather than engaging with the true essence of the ideas presented, emphasizing the importance of integrity in criticism.
In practice
This quote could be used in a lecture about the importance of genuine art criticism.
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
Bottom line, I have to follow what my soul says, or my spirit. And my spirit said that poetry and the arts should be without borders, should be without political borders.
Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.
As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.
As we lose our vagueness about ourself, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression .
This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.