Rent is about a community celebrating life, in the face of death and AIDS, at the turn of the century.
Jonathan LarsonRead
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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
ArtCraftsmanshipQualityInvestmentComposition
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on design, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of quality in artistic creations.
Similar quotes
When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.
Pablo PicassoRead
Every man is a plastic artist who must determine things for himself.
Joseph BeuysRead
There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy. If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.
Ray HarryhausenRead
As a songwriter, if you can touch people and make them feel a little less alone in the world, then you've done your job.
Tom CochraneRead
Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.
Jane GardamRead