“The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art… in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.”
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
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Wallace Stevens 278
American poet 1879–1955Related quotes
Nam June Paik, “Cybernated Art,” in Manifestos, Great Bear Pamphlets, (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), p. 24; Quoted in: Edward A. Shanken, " Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s http://www.artexetra.com//CyberneticsArtCultConv.pdf," in: From Energy to Information: Representation in Science, Technology, Art, and Literature, Stanford University Press, Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (eds.), 2002.
1960s
“Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
"An interview with James Baldwin" (1961)
Context: You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
“The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints.”
God's Country and Mine (1954)
Context: Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities — a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at — plain to the sight but sealed like an egg — is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught.
Source: Art As a Social System (2000), p. 102.
Bill Moyers interview (2002)
Context: I used to say that arts were talked about in the arts and leisure page. Now, why would it be arts and leisure? Why do we think that arts are leisure? Why isn't it arts and science or arts and the most important thing in your life? I think that art has become a big scarlet letter in our culture.
It's a big "A." And it says, you are an elitist, you're effete, or whatever those things... do you know what I mean? It means you don't connect. And I don't believe that. I think we've patronized our audiences long enough.
You can do things that would bring people to another place and still get someone on a very daily mundane moving level but you don't have to separate art from the masses.
quote from Franz Marc's note in 1907, he wrote down on his return from Paris; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 126
1905 - 1910
Letter to H. E. Kramer, 25-10-1926, as quoted in: Bram van Velde, A Tribute, Municipal Museum De Lakenhal Leiden, Municipal Museum Schiedam, Museum de Wieger, Deurne 1994, p. 44 (English translation: Charlotte Burgmans)
1920's
“The truth is more important than the facts.”