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Quote by Jonathan Santlofer

“The idea of going to school to be an art critic is a very crazy idea. I educated myself in public, which is a very painful way to learn - by writing and then discovering that I don't know what the f**k I'm talking about. But you remember the lessons vividly.”

Quote by Jonathan Santlofer

Author

Jonathan Santlofer
Jonathan Santlofer

Limited information is available about Jonathan Santlofer, who was born in 1946 and is of an unknown profession. more

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“The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist's relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman. These things do not come near it - the experience of beauty, the event of beauty. The anxiety about it is what makes it such a central concern of culture and makes us so interested in it.”

“My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics. We're talking about a closeted person with minimum contact with reality who has trouble tying his f**king shoes! And he's supposed to be political? A bus driver has a better perspective on things. Artists are completely indulgent.”

“My feeling is that most political poetry is preaching to the choir, and that the people who are going to make the political changes in our lives are not the people who read poetry, unfortunately. Poetry not specifically aimed at political revolution, though, is beneficial in moving people toward that kind of action, as well as other kinds of action. A good poem makes me want to be active on as many fronts as possible.”

“Every time I would arrive in China I would go through a few days of depression from being reminded of both short-term and long-term ruin; the ruining of the city that is happening in the short-term, and the ruining of culture and history that has happened over decades. When you see a building that says so much about the culture that built it being destroyed, there are a lot of emotions. You feel a lot of anger when you see a building being destroyed and realize that it's just a small part of what's going on in the entire country.”

“I don't think the possibility for beauty can be foreclosed, because beauty can take so many forms. There is beauty that arises from the unexpected, when our familiar perspectives are thrown off balance. There is also the beauty that paradoxically comes out of the tragic, that emerges because we are reminded of what is no longer there, that becomes powerful because of what is absent.”