To Love Music, Painting, Art
The Role of Art in our Lives
There are many conceptions of art, and of its role.
«Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an
offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy»,
considered Picasso, stating a radical one.
And it may be it indeed, for some artists. But not for
most of us. The art aimed at by Picasso isn’t the art we
love most, or the art aimed at by Flaubert when he said:
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly: ugly, heavy and
complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling,
than to conjure away the burden, and bitterness.
Gustav Flaubert, in M. Nadeau Correspondence
Or when Apollinaire wrote:
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of
nature's monotony.
Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters
The role of art they are thinking of is very different
from the one claimed by Picasso – that’s the art linked
to the beautiful or dreaming.
Indeed, what we love most in art is the beautiful and
the dream it may allow. The art we really love is the
one which allows us to evade from our cruel world. It’s
the music that we can breathe upon a bank of violets, to
use the words of Shakespeare: «O! it came o’er my ear
like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of
violets, stealing and giving odour».
It’s not the art that carries us to cruel and oppressive
realities, it’s not the art that protests and disturbs.
It’s not the art as a weapon and as a provocation
defended by Picasso.
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Quotations
Ways of Seeing Art
Aesthetics fills a capital virtue in our civilization, so
separated from religion and magic: not only it grants us the
possibility of admiring the beauties of existence, not only
it creates the beauty, or rather, the joy, but also helps us
to support the insupportable excess of reality, and, at the
same time, to face the world’s cruelty
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Método V
Our soul roves on the playhouses and in the movies, in the
same way our ancestors rove in jungle or in virgin forest.
Despite knowing that it’s but a film, it’s our emotional
participation that gives reality to the games of shadow and
light of the screen.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, As estrelas de
cinema
In the world of prose the true life is absent.
Rimbaud, 1854-1891, French poet, Iluminações
It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and
follies of human kind.
William Congreve, 1670-1729, English writer,
The Double Dealer
The object of art is to give life a
shape.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English writer, Midsummer
Night’s Dream
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O! it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English writer, Twelfth
Night
Give me some music; music, moody food
Of us that trade in love.
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English writer,
Anthony and Cleopatra
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