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 haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.
I like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.
The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.
The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.
[People] want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly. ... Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.
Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.
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