containment and freedom

Art breathes from containment and suffocates from freedom.
- Leonardo da Vinci

quoted in Art for oligarchs’ sake

Much questionable artistic production today is financially underpinned by taxpayers’ money, and the art of extracting money from the state for art projects is prone to landing up in the hands of well-organised cliques.

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Apart from the tendency of bureaucratic cliques to lavish public money on dubious artistic projects, the growing self-absorption and narcissism of our over-consumerised society has encouraged the notion that “self-expression”, however banal, is also “creative”.

• Pensée 134: How useless is painting, which attracts admiration by the resemblance of things, the originals of which we do not admire!
• Какая суетность: мы восхищаемся картиной за то, что на ней похоже изображены такие вещи, которыми мы вовсе не восхищаемся в натуре.

Блез Паскаль, Мысли