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Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

Kenneth Clark

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Kenneth Clark
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No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
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Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.
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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
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The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.
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I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.
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Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography the good ones all welcomed it and used it.
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A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
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I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.
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Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
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You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.
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The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.
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Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.
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One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called top people before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.
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All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
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Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.
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To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
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Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.
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Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.
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The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.
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People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.
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