Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.
—Benjamin Disraeli
Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.
—Benjamin Disraeli
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
—Pablo Picasso
The only still center of my life is Macbeth. To go back to doing this bloody, crazed, insane mass-murderer is a huge relief after trying to get my cell phone replaced.
—Patrick Stewart
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
—Orson Welles
A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
—Eugene Ionesco
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
—Lionel Trilling
I’ll confess right here that I secretly wish I’d have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.
—Berkeley Breathed
I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
—Steve Jobs
American Songwriter asked GhatGPT to rewrite Sympathy for the Devil. The AI came up with this for the chorus—
So won’t you please have empathy for our kind?
Understand the shadows that we bear
We’ve played our role throughout history’s pages
But we’re not solely to blame, I swear
While not on par with the song Jagger and Richards wrote, it’s style does seem to be in line with a bureaucratic, deep state, 21st-century vision of Hell.
Hmmmmm.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
—Oscar Wilde
Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary.
—Pierre Boulez
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
—John Cage
Man is a genius when he is dreaming.
—Akira Kurosawa
All creative people want to do the unexpected.
—Hedy Lamarr
When an opera star sings her head off, she usually improves her appearance.
—Victor Borge
Maureen Mullarkey has a post over at The Federalist about research into the racism associated with white paint. Norway, which for the moment is covered with vast swaths of white ice and snow, has granted about $1.2 million to the University of Bergen for an investigation into “How Norway Made the World Whiter (NorWhite).” The most common safe white dye is titanium dioxide which was developed in 1910 by a pair of Norwegian chemists.
There’s another grant of around $228,000 going the the Oslo National Academy of the Arts for a sister project “The Materiality of White (MoW).” This study is designed to “highlight TiO2’s materiality and ubiquity, and to contribute to critical thinking on the color white and its mineral origin”—all of that in search of an answer to the question, “Do we need our world to be more white?”
I remember enough high school physics and biology to know that the origin of the color white has nothing to do with minerals per se. Our sensation of the color white occurs when a broad spectrum of light excites all three types of receptors in our eyes. We see other colors when part or parts of the spectrum are missing. A white pigment such as TiO2 reflects a balanced spectrum of the light striking it.
I also remember enough high school chemistry to answer the question about the ubiquity of TiO2 in dyes. It’s vastly safer than the white lead dye it has replaced, especially in paints. Poisonings related to white paint dropped significantly during the first half of the last century as titanium white replaced lead white. BTW, white dye in a component of almost all colors other than black. It is added to moderate the strength of other pigments. The world would be much more boring without white dye.
As to whether melanin-deficient Norwegians need their world to be more white, I suggest they wait until after the spring thaw before making any rash judgments.
The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.
—Paul Klee
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
—Robert Frost
Talent is only the starting point.
—Irving Berlin
Not everybody goes to movies to get their life changed.
—Samuel L. Jackson
Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.
—Michelangelo
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
—Ralph Ellison
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
—Salvador Dali
I’ve done a movie and a TV series, and someday I’d like to do a successful movie and a successful TV series. That would be nice.
—Al Yankovic
Where talent is a dwarf, self-esteem is a giant.
—John Petit-Senn