Fredric Jameson Quotes

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

Art is a sense of magic.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

The most powerful part of the art is experiential, yet it's the hardest to describe because it's nonverbal.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic

Images and music are very connected.

That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.

Art is really more musical than it is visual.

The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

Although the poet has as wide a choice of subjects as the painter, his creations fail to afford as much satisfaction to mankind as do paintings... if the poet serves the understanding by way of the ear, the painter does so by the eye, which is the nobler sense.

Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.

... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art -- plastic, musical, poetic, balletic -- serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.