. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
Gertrude SteinRead
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that things are what they are, regardless of interpretation or context.
Gertrude Stein's repetitive phrase, 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,' suggests that a rose remains a rose, symbolizing the idea of identity and the essence of objects. Stein's work often explores the nature of language and meaning, and in this quote, she hints at the simplicity and clarity of perception, urging us to accept things as they are without overcomplicating our understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in an art class to discuss the role of perception in understanding artwork.
. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn't pass that up when it comes your way.
What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer.
Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. Heβs convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
There's something inimical about the camera and song.
My partner sometimes liked to go into the studio and improvise voice things just for fun. When I returned from England I transcribed one of her melodies, and had some of the hospice participants sing it, because they said they liked to sing. Their singing is very raw, but I'm going to use it for the final work.
One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.
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