University of the West of England

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left

Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore eachother through the centuries — embrace every posibility.

"I am aware that my approach to these artist's work was radically different from that of most visitors to art galleries in our time. Perhaps as an over-reaction to the Victorian critic who tended to pontificate, there is a tendency nowadays for people to make no critical judgment whatsoever, but to accept indiscriminately every thing that is in an art gallery for no better reason than that it is there. To people with that attitude, artworks are not good or bad, they simply are: this idea would seem to be an illogical extension of Alexander Pope's thought: All nature is but art unknown to thee, All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And, spite of pride, in erring reason's sprite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

"Their attitude is, however, a dangerous one for the plastic arts because it does not admit of standards. By it's anything-goes attitude, no painter is any better than any other painter, no age (except perhaps our own) any better than any other age. This is, of course, a reflection of the modern art historian, who with cold objectivity views paintings and other works of art as documents giving an account of the life and times of the men and women who made them. And from this point of view a miserable daub is just as important as a great masterpiece. The excrement I threw about as a child was incontestably as graphic a description of a child's frustration as the frescos in the Sistine Chapel are of a great artist's inspiration, the difference being, I would argue, that as art, it was not as good. Likewise, I believe that the neurotic, desperately extrovert and egocentric works of art that characterise our century provide an admirably clear indication of the mental and spiritual disorders of our time, but, as art, leave much to be desired."

Sometimes it is difficult to decide whether art recreates phenomenon from life, or whether infact the opposite is the case: that the phenomemona of life are the results of penetration of aesthetic cliches into reality.