Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the joyous nature of visual art forms as expressions of human creativity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that picture and sculpture serve as vibrant celebrations of physical forms, enhancing our appreciation of art through their visual and tactile qualities. He implies that these artistic expressions invite us to experience beauty and creativity, transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary during our engagement with art.
In practice
In a speech at an art gallery opening, one might inspire appreciation by quoting Emerson.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
I have a great body, I really do. But I want to be taken seriously as an artist, and wearing anything that shows it off will be a distraction from the music. That's how my signature uniform, my tuxedo, came about. It's classic and timeless. You'll see me in black, white, and a pop of color on my lips. That pop adds a little magic.
I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.
The only thing that's important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.
Hip-hop is a beautiful culture. It's inspirational, because it's a culture of survivors. You can create beauty out of nothingness.
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.