Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by David Bayles

Quote by David Bayles

“at any given moment, the world offers vastly more support to work it already understands — namely, art that’s already been around for a generation or a century. Expressions of truly new ideas often fail to qualify as even bad art — they’re simply viewed as no art at all.... On both intellectual and technical grounds, it’s wise to remain on good terms with your artistic heritage, lest you devote several incarnations to re-inventing the wheel. But once having allowed for that, the far greater danger is not that the artist will fail to learn anything from the past, but will fail to teach anything new to the future.... The unfolding over time of a great idea is like the growth of a fractal crystal, allowing details and refinements to multiply endlessly — but only in ever-decreasing scale. Eventually (perhaps by the early 1960’s) those who stepped forward to carry the West Coast Landscape Photography banner were not producing art, so much as re-producing the history of art.... Only those who commit to following their own artistic path can look back and see this issue in clear perspective: the real question about acceptance is not whether your work will be viewed as art, but whether it will be viewed as”

Quote by David Bayles

Book:Art and Fear
Create image

Work

Art and Fear

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

David Bayles

David Bayles, born in 1952, is a renowned author known for his insightful exploration of art creation and the psychology of success. more

You May Also Like

“After all, the world does (in large measure) reward authentic work. The problem is not absolute, but temporal: by the time your reward arrives, you may no longer be around to collect it....at any given moment, the world offers vastly more support to work it already understands — namely, art that’s already been around for a generation or a century. Expressions of truly new ideas often fail to qualify as even bad art — they’re simply viewed as no art at all.”

ArtArtist
Book:Art and Fear
Create image

“I think of a line that has always stayed with me, from Marwa Helal's "poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids." "This is where the poets will interject. They will say show- dont tell. But that assumes most people can see." It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit- exclaim, even- that no description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it. At the very least, one should not be able to have it both ways. One should not, with a modicum of self-respect, quote Morrison and Baldwin at every turn, but then, faced with the sort of injustice with which so much of their work contends, suddenly retreat into descriptions of whatever it is the finches are doing. What is this work we do? What are we good for? The literary critic Northup Frye once said, "all art is metaphor. And the metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity. Our derangement. The plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul. One's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot, in any rational way, be understood. Only felt. Only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque- what we do to one another so grotesque- that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.”

ArtSufferingLossGriefGenocide
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image

“I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became calm. I can't think of any other word for it. I was thinking about the beach poem again, and I started to feel that I was being looked after, that everything was OK. It was strange: if there was ever a time in my life when I had the right to feel alone this was it. But I lost that sense of loneliness. I felt like there was a force in the room with me, not a person, but I had a sense that there was another world, another dimension, and it would be looking after me. It was like, "This isn't the only world, this is just one aspect of the whole thing, don't imagine this is all there is.”

GodSpiritualityLonelinessCalm
Book:A Killing Frost
Create image

“I wanted to use art. I wanted to use art in a different way in my life. I wanted a sense that... All the nooks and crannies that we don't understand about the way that we life through our day to day life, and I wanted that shown to me, you know? Not in great clarity, but some kind of physical manifestation of these are the areas of life that are causing you grief, or euphoria, and you don't really know why.”

LifeArtArtistMusicMusicianDavid Bowie
Author:David Bowie
Create image