Artistic Decay Quotes

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

An artist should remain true. Otherwise his talent, like his stomach, grows fat and stuffy.

I called the album 'The Chemo' because it seems like the industry and music overall is dying slowly.

Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.

I set down a beautiful chord on paper—and suddenly it rusts.

The protest years were over, not just for me but for a whole generation, and in music, just like in politics, many of the greatest talents were dead or in exile, and their place was filled by third-rate imitators.

Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

Theater used to be a verb; it used to be an act. But nowadays it is just a noun. It is a place.

Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.

The main things to rebel against - over-production, too much technology, overthinking. It's a spoiled mentality; everything is too easy. If you want to record a song, you can buy Pro Tools and record four hundred guitar tracks. That leads to overthinking, which kills any spontaneity and the humanity of the performance.

I watched Picasso visit the Planet of the Apes, as the masters rot on walls and the angels eat the grapes.

What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life.

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.

Made poetry a mere mechanic art.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.

What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip.

The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo; And now my tongue's use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp, Or like a cunning instrument cased up Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.