Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Felisa Tan

Quote by Felisa Tan

“Sometimes my pictures do not describe grand places or things, and sometimes they are not grand pictures; but they mean something to me —like this abandoned corner at the back of a church. She called to me that she was dying, crumbling down, and only some appreciation could save her.”

Quote by Felisa Tan

Work

In Search for Meaning

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Felisa Tan

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Felisa Tan. more

You May Also Like

“Kant noted that we typically apply labels or concepts to the world to classify sensory inputs that suit a purpose. ... Beautiful objects do not serve ordinary human purposes, as plates and spoons do. A beautiful rose pleases us, but not because we necessarily want to eat it or even pick it for a flower arrangement. Kant’s way of recognizing this was to say that something beautiful has purposiveness without a purpose’.”

“Hume emphasized education and experience: men of taste acquire certain abilities that lead to agreement about which authors and artworks are the best. Such people, he felt, eventually will reach consensus, and in doing so, they set a ‘standard of taste’ which is universal. … Hume said men of taste must ‘preserve minds free from prejudice’, but thought no one should enjoy immoral attitudes or ‘vicious manners’ in art … Kant too spoke about judgements of taste but he was more concerned with explaining judgements of Beauty. He aimed to show that good judgements in aesthetics are grounded in features of artworks themselves, not just in us and our preferences. Kant tried to describe our human abilities to perceive and categorize the world around us. There is a complex interplay among our mental faculties including perception, imagination, and intellect or judgement. Kant held that in order to function in the world to achieve our human purposes, we label much of what we sense, often in fairly unconscious ways.”

“Of course I could never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would not have understood it. I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes— too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them.”

“There is a movement afoot to convince artists that they are simply another type of entrepreneur. On the surface, this is a seemingly harmless and understandable rejection of the starving artist trope. Yet people seem to have forgotten that, since the beginning of recorded history, artists' cultural role went far beyond simply making a product to peddle.”