Beatriz Baptista > Recent Status Updates

1. Against Interpretation

“The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys, it digs "behind" the text, to find a subtest which is the true one.”

+ “The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (…), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.”

1. Against Interpretation

“Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it.” +

1. The Decay of Lying: 5/5 ⭐️

eu amo este homem

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“(…) Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
things, is the proper aim of Art.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.”

“(…) Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“The moment art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything. As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter. (…) The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. (…) Besides, it is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.”

— 1. The Decay of lying —

“At other times it entirely anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy. In no case does it reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time to the time itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.”

“Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“(…) so those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism. It is silly, too. It springs from an entire ignorance of psychology. Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place and people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less it represents to us the spirit of its age.”

— The Decay of Lying —

“Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“Artfinds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.”

+ “while Life – poor, prob-able, uninteresting human life – tired of repeating herself for the (…) scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prison house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style;” +

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“Whatever was his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society (…)”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability. (…) Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.”

— 1. The Decay of lying —

“The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie (…)”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“Facts (…) have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarizing mankind.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognize that the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty. (…) Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensitied mode of over-emphasis.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“(…) we have rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it. And this is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and what is not. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all.”

— 1. The Decay of Lying —

“As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art's subject-matter we should be more or less indifferent.”