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# Weekend Words: Wreck
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-wreck/
- Published: 2015-06-14T13:19:44.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:31:17.000Z
- Description: “Contemporary art’s job is to wreck what came before.” John Waters, from his commencement speech at the Rhode Island School of Design last weekend.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:08 (2014, 2015, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/06/wreck.jpg)

Caspar David Friedrich, “Wreck in the Moonlight” (c.1835), oil on canvas, 31,3 x 42,5 cm, Nationalgalerie, Berlin (image via Web Gallery of Art)

“Contemporary art’s job is to wreck what came before.” — John Waters, from his [commencement speech](http://www.artnews.com/2015/06/08/john-waters-at-risd-commencement-contemporary-arts-job-is-to-wreck-what-came-before/?ref=hyperallergic.com) at the Rhode Island School of Design last weekend

> The wreckage of stars ― I built a world from this wreckage.  
>  
> **―Friedrich Nietzsche, *Dithyrambs of Dionysus***

> The world’s great age begins anew,  
> The golden years return,  
> The earth doth like a snake renew  
> Her winter weeds outworn:  
> Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam  
> Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.  
>  
> **―Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Helas”**

> Old age is a shipwreck.  
>  
> **―Charles De Gaulle**

> Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.  
>  
> **―Virginia Woolf, *A Room of One’s Own***

> They didn’t think much to the Ocean:  
> The waves, they were fiddlin’ and small,  
> There was no wrecks and nobody  
> drownded,  
> Fact, nothing to laugh at at all.  
>  
> **―Marriott Edgar, *The Lion and Albert***

> There’s just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.  
>  
> **―Margaret Mitchell, *Gone with the Wind***

> The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life — and one is as good as the other.  
>  
> **―Ernest Hemingway, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1929**

> I came to explore the wreck.  
> The words are purposes.  
> The words are maps.  
> I came to see the damage that was done  
> and the treasures that prevail.  
> I stroke the beam of my lamp  
> slowly along the flank  
> of something more permanent  
> than fish or weed  
>  
> the thing I came for:  
> the wreck and not the story of the wreck  
> the thing itself and not the myth  
> the drowned face always staring  
> toward the sun.  
>  
> **―Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”**

> Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.  
>  
> **―Immanuel Kant**

> You win some, lose some, and wreck some.  
>  
> **―Dale Earnhardt**