“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.
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James Baldwin 163
(1924-1987) writer from the United States 1924–1987Related quotes
“The important business of man is life, and the important business of life is death.”
“I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.”
Osnos, Evan. “ It’s Not Beautiful: An Artist Takes On the System http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=all.” New Yorker, May 24, 2010, 54–63.
2010-, 2010
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.
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
“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”
“Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.”
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: I want you to understand what has been done in the world to force men to think alike. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike. Why did he not do so? Why did he make your brain so that you could not by any possibility be a Methodist? Why did he make yours so that you could not be a Catholic? And why did he make the brain of another so that he is an unbeliever — why the brain of another so that he became a Mohammedan — if he wanted us all to believe alike?
After all, maybe Nature is good enough and grand enough and broad enough to give us the diversity born of liberty. Maybe, after all, it would not be best for us all to be just the same. What a stupid world, if everybody said yes to everything that everybody else might say.
The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes — more important than gold or houses or lands — more important than art or science — more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.