Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 24 (p. 431)
Context: The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle — another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like, or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.
“Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion.”
Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 208
Context: The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow “expertise” and “theoretical sophistication” (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought. … Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.
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Camille Paglia 326
American writer 1947Related quotes
Robert Costanza, Ecological economics: the science and management of sustainability. Columbia University Press, 1992.
“So vast the labor to create
The fabric of the Roman state!”
Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book I, p. 4
“Within your magic web of hair, lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world;”
"The Web of Eros"
The Wooden Pegasus (1920)
Context: Within your magic web of hair, lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world;
The dire gold of the comet's wind-blown hair;
The songs that turned to gold the evening air
When all the stars of heaven sang for joy.
Source: Designing Social Systems in a Changing World (1996), p. 46; as cited in: Charles François (2004), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics. p. 164
Joseph Kosuth. (1969), as cited in: Claude Gintz, Musée d'Art Moderne Paris (1989). L'Art conceptuel, une perspective: exposition au Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 22 nov. 1989 - 18 fév. 1990. p. 42
The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910-11) vol. 17, p. 268.
Criticism