Weekend Words

Gustave Courbet, “The Desperate Man” (1844-45). Oil on canvas. 17 3/4 x 21 5/8 inches. (Private Collection, courtesy of BNP Paribas Art Advisory / Photo: © Michel Nguyen)

An exquisite corpse of apposite quotes from the Hyperallergic Weekend Editors.

After the storm, the election:

“I am not only a socialist, but also a democrat and a republican, in a word, a partisan of revolution and, above all, a realist, that is, the sincere friend of the real truth.”

—Gustave Courbet

“The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.”

—Norman Mailer

John Hancock: “Fortunately there are not enough men of property in America to dictate policy.”

John Dickinson replies, “Perhaps not. But don’t forget that most men without property would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich, than face the reality of being poor.”

—An exchange between these Founding Fathers in the 1972 film 1776, screenplay by Peter Stone.

“When access, success and career advancement are based as much on manners and social convention, the people who succeed are the people who master that, not actual talent. Telling young artists to keep their opinions to themselves is basically telling them, “It doesn’t matter about the work, it matters how you treat your betters.” We’re just maintaining a good old-fashioned caste system. If you can’t play the game, you can’t play the game. People who aren’t good at sucking up to the right people lose out.”

—Isaac Butler

“So much of what is now called performance (not theater) might exist in an ethical conversation, but it is usually between the apparent (often unstated) political position of the creator and the world outside the performance that is being referred to through the performance’s themes. The ethical conversation is not embedded in the work, but is rather a precondition of the work that seems to have given the work its reason to be; but inside the work itself, there’s very little time spent working one ethical position vs. another. Performance is itself an expression of an ethic, and its counter-ethic is simply whatever it is beating itself against. But inherent in this is that no ethic is really seen as having validity, except the desire to perform (which is assumed ethical) and point out unethical behavior. This is different than in larger scale theater, where various ethical positions are all taken seriously and their consequences played out dramatically through action that is enclosed upon itself.”

—Kirk Bromley