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Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Quotes

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Famous Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Quotes

“The purpose of art is then to reveal a beauty that we like or can be taught to like; the purpose of art is to give pleasure; the work of art as the source of pleasure is its own end; art is for art's sake. We value the work for the pleasure to be derived from the sight, sound, or touch of its aesthetic surfaces; our conception of beauty is literally skin-deep; questions of utility and intelligibility rarely arise, and if they arise are dismissed as irrelevant.”

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Book:Christian & Oriental Philosophy of Art Formerly: "Why Exhibit Works of Art?"
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“Industry without art is brutality. Art is specifically human. None of those primitive peoples, past or present, whose culture we affect to despise and propose to amend, has dispensed with art; from the stone age onwards, everything made by man, under whatever conditions of hardship or poverty, has been made by art to serve a double purpose, at once utilitarian and ideological. It is we who, collectively speaking at least, command amply sufficient resources, and who do not shrink from wasting these resources, who have first proposed to make a division of art, one sort to be barely utilitarian, the other luxurious, and altogether omitting what was once the highest function of art, to express and to communicate ideas.”

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Book:Christian & Oriental Philosophy of Art Formerly: "Why Exhibit Works of Art?"
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