People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.
Edith PiafRead
Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense. A composition for cheapness and not excellence of workmanship is the most frequent and certain cause of the rapid decay and entire destruction of arts and manufacturers.
Interpretation
Art and craftsmanship require intention and investment; quality cannot be achieved through shortcuts.
Josiah Wedgwood emphasizes that beautiful art and compositions are the result of careful planning and significant investment of resources. He argues that attempting to create art on the cheap often leads to inferior quality, which ultimately causes a quick decline in the value and respect for art and craftsmanship. This highlights the importance of prioritizing excellence over mere cost-saving measures in creative fields.
In practice
During a lecture on design, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of quality in artistic creations.
People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.
The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer's movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.
I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
When you design a building, you start from a general philosophy, and you come down, and you start from detail and come up. Only the theoretical architect believes that you can make the concept and then sometime, somebody will come to build it.
I was wearing black clothes almost from the beginning. I feel comfortable in black. I felt like black looked good onstage, that it was attractive, so I started wearing it all the time.
Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.
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