Contextual Significance Quotes

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

My bag is approaching something and taking it to another place. Like words-you take a word and by the time you've finished with it, you milk it and you go through the emotion of what it is, what it means there and then.

In the sense that you're not at the centre of power, like a president or prime minister of a major power, everyone is marginalised; my position doesn't isn't unique in that respect. I think there are different sorts of relevance in different contexts.

A lot can be told from what happens in between the main moments.

It is always a problem to know what an image means.

Being a good Hans Haacke student, part of his influence on me is that there's no difference between a gallery show and a film - or even an ad and a T-shirt-in terms of cultural legitimacy. They're just different contexts in which to have some sort of communication.

A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

It's the frames which make some things important and some things forgotten. It's all only frames from which the content rises.

Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon... what it means to you.

A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

Clothes, when abstracted from the flow of present time and their transmogrifying function on the human body, and seen as forms in themselves, are strange tubes and excrescences worthy of being classed with such facial decorations as the ring through the nose or the lip-stretching disk. But how enchanting they become when seen togetherwith the qualities they bestow on their wearer! What happens then is no less than the infusion, into some tangled lines on a piece of paper, of the meaning of a great word.

Cut the pie any way you like, "meanings" just ain't in the head!

Fashion is not interesting unless it has some connection to something outside of that world. It's the same thing with any part of the arts: you can't just take pictures - you have to look at science, to listen to music; you have to be aware of the connections within the world. If you take something in an isolated box, it loses all significance.

In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.

As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.

The music aids the message, it's there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence.

Every story has a place where it deserves to be told.

Meaning is not in things but in between them.

A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.

I'd be interested to read Gull's paper on it, and I wish Alan would put it in somewhere. It gives him a relevance to our times, which he doesn't otherwise have. Gull, I mean, not Alan.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

Size doesn't mean anything - not all the time.