“Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become.”
—Jean Cocteau

The Perils of Theory

There is a temptation to find and use a model, or set of theories, to produce good artwork. And there’s also a temptation to analyze and reverse-engineer great works of art in order to discover the formulae used to create them.

These temptations should be avoided.

There are no secret aesthetic formulae, there is no cause and effect relationship that’s of any use to anyone but the artist who concocted it.

“I do not believe that art should have anything in common with theories that are apart from it. That is too much like propaganda.”
—Marcel Duchamp

“No formula has produced even a single good melody. Of course, you can look back at any melody and write a formula that will produce it and variations on it. But that is retrospective, not prospective. Lovely chess moves and lovely melodies (and lovely theorems in mathematics, etc.) have this in common: every one has idiosyncratic nuances that seem logical a posteriori but that are not easy to anticipate a priori.”
—Douglas R. Hofstadter

“Art is the work you should be doing while you’re out busy trying to define it.”
—Armistead Maupin

“Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.”
—Barnett Newman

“I’ve always liked things that aren’t clearly identified in one camp or another. I like things that sit on boundaries.”
—Brian Eno

“If we define anything too carefully, it tends to disappear.”
—Kinky Friedman

“One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.”
—T. H. Huxley

“Most critics today have nothing to say so they cover their nakedness with weavings of pseudo-intellectual jargon.”
—Bill Jay

“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
—William Somerset Maugham

“I am a bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.”
—Winnie-the-Pooh

“Art is never didactic, does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.”
—Agnes Repplier

“The wordsmiths who serve established power, on the other hand, are always devoted to obscurity. They castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim. The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it.”
—John Ralston Saul

“The perfect man has no method; or rather the best of methods, which is the method of no-method.”
—Shih-T’ao

“I am appalled at the kind of criticism that regards every work as a rebus of art history, to be decoded into its constituent references and thereby lauded for its erudition or condemned for its lack of originality (heads or tails).”
—Rebecca Solnit

“The only thing that matters is the finished photograph.”
—Alfred Stieglitz

“Photography became an art when the first artist used photography. There is nothing theoretical about it.”
—Paul Strand

“The rules of the game are so tentative that they are automatically, though subtly, amended each time the game is successfully played.”
—John Szarkowski

“Art has a way of undermining all aesthetic theories.”
—Calvin Tomkins

“I am a bit like an eccentric collector, creating my own archives, filing insights on photographic index cards. The danger of this state of mind is that one begins to see the world in intellectual terms only.”
—Arthur Tress

“Once the people begin to reason, all is lost.”
—François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire