Jacques Barzun Quotes about Art

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Philosophy, Real

The House of Intellect ch. 6 (1959)

Criticism will need an injection of humility that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Humility, Vocabulary

Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.20, Wesleyan University Press

A person is not a democrat thanks to his ignorance of literature and the arts, nor an elitist because he or she has cultivated them. The possession of knowledge makes for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose: a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to oppress the rest of us.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Ignorance, Physicians

"Exeunt the Humanities". Essay by Jacques Barzun (1980) published in his book "The Culture We Deserve" (p. 117), 1989.

The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Men, Skills

"The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors Classic and Modern" by Jacques Barzun, 1956.

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Writing, Unique

It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Strong, Philosophy

1964 Science, The Glorious Entertainment.

We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Appreciate, Age

Jacques Barzun (1984). “Critical Questions: On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940-1980”, p.164, University of Chicago Press

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Memorable, Form

The House of Intellect (1959) ch. 6

Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion - to say nothing of the shape of his sentences - are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Pain, Taken

"Bernard Shaw in Twilight" by Jacques Barzun in "The Kenyon Review", Volume 5, No. 3 (pp. 321-345), Part II, www.jstor.org. Summer 1943.

On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Reflection, Issues

Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.69, Wesleyan University Press

The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.

Jacques Barzun

Art, Interesting, Rewards

"A Surfeit of Fine Art". Essay by Jacques Barzun (1986) published in his book "The Culture We Deserve" (p. 127), 1989.