Books, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (1981)
Books, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (1981)
“Ladies have a bad taste in men. I'm not that good looking.”
“"Taste is relative" is the excuse adopted by those eras that have bad taste.”
Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1992)
"Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), note 54, p. 291
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Context: The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.
“Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life”
I wish to play with human feeling, with its 'morbidity' in a cold and ferocious manner. Only very recently I have become a sort of gravedigger of art (oddly enough, I am using the very terms of my enemies). Some of my latest works have been coffins and tombs. During the same time I succeeded in painting with fire, using particularly powerful and searing gas flames, some of them measuring three to four meters high. I use these to bathe the surface of the painting in such a way that it registered the spontaneous trace of fire.
Quote from Klein's 'Chelsea Hotel Manifesto', 1961; from the Yves Klein Archives - archived from the original on 15 January 2013; as cited on Wikipedia: Yves Klein
After the opening of his unsuccessful exhibition at Leo Castelli's Gallery, New York 1961, Klein stayed with Rotraut Uecker (fr) at the Chelsea Hotel for the duration of the exhibition. While there, he wrote the 'Chelsea Hotel Manifesto', a proclamation of the 'multiplicity of new possibilities'
1960 -1964
Le bon goût, le tact et le bon ton, ont plus de rapport que n'affectent de le croire les Gens de Lettres. Le tact, c'est le bon goût appliqué au main- tien et à la conduite; le bon ton, c'est le bon goût appliqué aux discours et à la conversation.
Maximes et Pensées, #427
Maxims and Considerations, #427
Le génie enfante, le goût conserve. Le goût est le bon sens du génie; sans le goût, le génie n'est qu'une sublime folie.
François-René de Chateaubriand, in "Essai sur la littérature anglaise (1836): Modèles classiques http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/CadresFenetre?O=NUMM-101390&M=tdm.
Misattributed
