I think all these bigshot political parties betray their principles (which they used to be surreptitious about, but now they openly wallow in it). They’re all just careerists and toadies. They are all so much smaller than our humanism, our formalized expression of experience. Thoughts?
Quote:
It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.
—Cyril Connolly, 1949
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Quote:
The culture is in a decadent phase, with taste breaking apart in desensitized confusion, artists lashed about by societal mores, and institutions shackled by ever more byzantine and tortured regulations.
—Jacques Barzun, 2001
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The “Frontispice” (1918) is one of the least known, least discussed advances in modernism in the arts, perhaps equivalent to Kirsanoff’s 1926
Ménilmontant or Huysmans’s “The Damned” (“Là-Bas”). Who can say why it sprang from its revered composer’s shattered soul, back from the front lines of the Great War and still mourning his dead mother? Ravel has only recently been situated in the decadent
avant garde, in Michael Puri’s
Ravel the Decadent (Oxford University Press, 2012).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vii_I3JTf5s