Aesthetic Paradox Quotes

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.

The wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of the world, and I see - this, all this, is what the French call d'un beau affreux, what the Germans call hubsch-hasslich - the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as 'Le laid peut etre beau' - The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace.

...what I try to do is a good bad picture. I work it out very carefully, and then I do something that looks as if it went wrong.

If you can say something beautiful in a very terrible way - I was always drawn to that.

Music is the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical....music is under two signs, the stars and the wine

In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.

Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!

I love to read theories without ever using them when working... The paradoxical fact in the aesthetic is that theories are also true in reverse.

It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.

My style is like, if I were to time travel to the '80s or '90s, I would fit in, but they would be like, 'Something's off about her.'

I see flaws as a kind of beauty.

What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?

I want color and form to have contradictorily functions.

It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.