Quotessence
Home / Authors / Joshua Gibbs

Joshua Gibbs Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllBeautyArtGood TasteConservatismTraditionAestheticsRoger ScrutonTasteModernityForgeryArchitectureArtiesArtificialintelligenceArtistsBad ArtBanalityBasedCathedralsChristianityConserevatism

Famous Joshua Gibbs Quotes

“Americans have been slow to identify mediocrity because mediocre art simultaneously embraces virtues which both progressives and conservatives hold dear. In order to condemn mediocrity, one must believe that surviving the test of time is a very reliable sign of goodness, and very few persons on the political left would agree to this premise. However, condemning mediocrity also depends upon admitting that, regardless of other boons it might offer society, capitalism has not been good for art, and very few conservatives would admit this.”

ArtConservatismGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“While Spotify openly publishes user listening activity, the “Private Session” option allows users to listen to music they think stupid, immature, or embarrassing apart from their friends’ knowledge. The “Private Session” feature on Spotify subtly reveals how intensely we want our friends to think we have good taste, and yet we are unwilling to suffer any diminution of comfort or pleasure to achieve this distinction. We want to enjoy sensual trash, but we do not want to be held accountable for it.”

ArtBeautyGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“When progressives and Christians speak of “nature,” they are not referring to the same thing. Within the framework of Christian thought, nature can only be understood in its relationship with the supernatural... In cutting nature off from supernature, the Enlightenment inaugurated a long, slowly unfurling contempt for both nature and supernature which reaches new heights every year.”

ArtBeautyProgressGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“Apart from a belief in the supernatural, it has become very hard to distinguish the natural from the unnatural. Without Heaven, what is the difference between Hell and Earth? Without God, how can the human and the demonic be told apart? More than two hundred years after the French Revolution, the only people who attack a position or practice as “unnatural” are those who believe in God, as well, because the concept of nature only makes sense as an intermediary between the supernatural and the unnatural.”

ArtBeautyGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“The average man sees an ugly avant-garde painting, learns it sold for a hundred million dollars, and cannot help responding, “But I could have painted that,” which is exactly the point. The progressive art critic might not claim the beauty of Pollock’s paintings was inherent in the paintings themselves, but in the ideas the painting communicates— although, it should be noted, every art critic has much to gain in championing art which cannot be understood without an interpreter.”

ArtConservatismGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“The Enlightenment project was doomed from the start, though, for though human beings run out of money, time, resources, energy, and desire, they never run out of the past. A war on the past will necessarily be endless, for no sooner has a man conquered the past than the very act of conquering becomes the past, as well.”

ArtBeautyConservatismGood TasteFrench Revolution
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“Against the reliability of common sense, the laws of science, the ravages of sin, the tendencies of mankind, and the metaphysics which govern created things, some things are not destroyed by time. The ability to last is so exceedingly rare, when a man finds something which has bested time, he has found something for which there is only fitting adjective: divine.”

ArtBeautyTraditionConservatismAestheticsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“It is natural to care for those who have cared for us, but at the point a man has been dead a hundred years, no one alive who yet cares for him has any natural reason for doing so. In the several decades following a man’s death, those who knew him might carry a torch for his memory, describe the love they received from him, and champion the spirit they have inherited from him. However, if people are still willing to listen to a man one hundred years after his death, he speaks from the grave. After natural affection passes, if any affection remains, it is supernatural.”

ArtTraditionHeritageConservatismAestheticsGood TasteConventionRemi Brague
Author:Joshua Gibbs
Create image

“Despite such verve and passion for Truth, the Christian brand is now rightly denigrated everywhere as trite and trivial. To put the word “Christian” before any kind of service, institution, or work of art is to consign the thing in question to the garbage pile of cut-rate design and cheap sentimentality.”

ArtBeautyChristianityConservatismAestheticsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“Pleasure takes place in the body, but satisfaction is of the soul, and so things which offer purely physical pleasure cannot help egging people on to consume more and more in search of a spiritual state the carnal thing is incapable of delivering. The economy of spiritual things is different because spirit is immaterial, intellectual, and unquantifiable. There is not “more Christ” in a small bite of the Eucharist than a large one, neither is the object blessed with a bucket of holy water more holy than an object blessed with a thimble full. Inasmuch as a thing appeals more to the spirit than the body, a man needs less of it, which is why many people have accidentally eaten an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting, but no one has ever accidentally read the entire gospel of St. John in one sitting.”

ArtBeautyConservatismAestheticsGood TasteRoger Scruton
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“Beauty is what lies beyond usefulness. Beauty inspires loyalty and gives meaning to mere usefulness. We need useful things, but we love beautiful things. A building which is merely functional will not last, for people will not love it. They will get bored with it. The average football stadium now costs a billion dollars to build and lasts just thirty years, after which it appears dated, silly, and unfashionable. The Chartres Cathedral, on the other hand, is more beautiful than any sports complex on earth and it has been functional for more than 800 years. Beautiful things last because when they begin to fall apart, we tend to them, revive and restore them; however, when purely functional things fall apart, we tire of them and replace them.”

ArtBeautyArchitectureConservatismModernityCathedralsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“To say that Mark Rothko painted “colorful rectangles” really does sum up the man’s oeuvre. The thrill of Rothko’s work is entirely bound up in the massive size of his canvases. The same is true of Pollock and Newman. Had either been forced to use notebook sized canvases, all their power would be lost. On the other hand, the Mona Lisa is still interesting when reduced to the size of a postage stamp.”

BeautyArtificialintelligenceGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“Jackson Pollock and Hugh Hefner both rose to prominence in the 1950s, though Pollock’s appeal was that no one understood him, and Hefner’s appeal was that no one misunderstood him. When Modern men think of art, they tend to think of such highs and lows. In the midst of this daring game of extremes, art lost the common touch.”

BeautyPornographyAestheticsGood TasteModern ArtConserevatism
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“Very beautiful things become harder to like the more we give ourselves over to the spectacular, sexy, shocking, ultra-sensual, fashionable art and ethics of Modernity. So far as acquiring good taste is concerned, balance is a myth. Every blockbuster film a man watches makes the task of reading Paradise Lost and Jane Eyre seem more dull and more pointless.”

BeautyConservatismAestheticsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image

“Mediocre art not only hinders our ability to understand other people, it demands that we interpret our own lives through a laughably narrow range of emotions largely defined and curated by the unmarried, agnostic, pro-choice twentysomethings who now rule our culture.”

BeautyTasteConservatismAestheticsGood TasteRoger Scruton
Book:Will Heaven Be Boring?: A Conversation About Beauty and Good Taste
Create image

“In "A Stolen Life," Dugard’s ability to think through questions of suffering, love, hope, and justice is indistinguishable from that of people her age who have lived "normally,” immersed in the world of blockbuster films, disposable fashion, popular music, easy virtue, virtue signaling, screen addiction, trendy political causes, and banal propaganda. The further I got into "A Stolen Life," the more I realized Dugard sounded just like the young women (and men) whose work I read in college writing workshops. My conclusion is both horrifying and offensive: for all the good our freedom is doing us we might as well have been locked up in a dungeon with demoniacs. The effects of living freely in the Modern world are not easily distinguishable from the effects of living in captivity with a psychopath.”

BeautyTraditionModernityModernismGood TasteBanality
Author:Joshua Gibbs
Create image

“We do not deserve a better culture than the one we have; every culture is perfectly suited to the music it produces, the churches it builds, and the poems it writes. We cannot lament our inability to build a fitting sequel to St. Peter’s Basilica without simultaneously lamenting our complete lack of a theology that might compel us to do so.”

BeautyConservatismModernityGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
Create image