I am very attracted by bad taste-it is a lot more exciting than that supposed good taste which is nothing more than a standardized way of looking at things.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that unconventional or 'bad' taste can lead to more exciting creativity than conforming to traditional standards of good taste.
Helmut Newton emphasizes the allure of embracing bad taste in art and aesthetics, arguing that it sparks excitement and originality. He critiques the notion of good taste as merely a monotonous standardization that stifles creativity and encourages a narrow view of beauty, suggesting that true innovation comes from breaking norms and exploring the unconventional.
In practice
In a speech about creativity in art, one might say, 'As Helmut Newton once stated, 'I am very attracted by bad taste.' This reflects how breaking away from norms can often lead to more intriguing results.
I have always avoided photographing in the studio. A woman does not spend her life sitting or standing in front of a seamless white paper background. Although it makes my life more complicated, I prefer to take my camera out into the street... and places that are out of bounds for photographers have always had a special attraction for me.
I like photographing women who appear to know something of life. I recently did a session with a great beauty, a movie star in in her thirties. I photographed her twice within three weeks and the second time I said: "You're much more beautiful today than you were three weeks ago." And she replied: "But I'm also three weeks older.
They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure.
I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.
The point of my photography has always been to challenge myself, to go a little further than my Germanic discipline and Teutonic nature would traditionally permit me to.
The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance.
Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.
The most important thing to realize is that everyone is capable of telling a story.
Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.
Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.
I don't like records that are the same from beginning to end, that are too styled and slick. Everything is so designed and airbrushed and Botoxed, it makes us think, 'Oh, everybody's perfect except me. Everything's smooth except me.' But nothing is smooth.
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