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Patrick Bringley Books

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“Artists create records of transitory moments, appearing to stop their clocks. They help us believe that some things aren’t transitory at all but rather remain beautiful, true, majestic, sad, or joyful over many lifetimes—and here is the proof, painted in pole, carved in marble, stitched into quilts.”

ArtMuseumsArtistsArt History
Book:All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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“The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that's there. We shouldn't think "This is good," or "This is bad," or "This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, Z." Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn't think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.”

ArtMuseumsArt HistoryArt Appreciation
Book:All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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“Put it this way. If you or I were to build a machine, we'd go about it logically, with the fewest necessary parts moving in clean, efficient ways. But living nature doesn't work that way at all. It builds via the most fantastic redundancies and curlicues, millions of little variations around a theme, so that if three-quarters go haywire, life survives. The results are Rube Goldberg devices, but sturdy Rube Goldberg devices, unimaginably weird and densely layered Rube Goldberg devices, literally unimaginable in that our brains aren't adequate to comprehend the sort of microscopic megacities hidden within the tiniest cell. I thought that was neat.”

LifeScienceMathPhysicsBiologyCells In Our Body
Book:All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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