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On Moral Fiction QUOTES

On Moral Fiction QUOTES

1 " Most art these days is either trivial or false. There has always been bad art, but only when a culture's general world view and aesthetic theory have gone awry is bad art what most artists strive for, mistaking bad for good. In Plato's Athens or Shakespeare's London, who would have clapped for the merdistes? For the most part our artists do not struggle-as artists have traditionally struggled-toward a vision of how things out to be or what has gone wrong; they do not provide us with the flicker of lightning that shows us where we are. Either they pointlessly waste our time, saying and doing nothing, or they celebrate ugliness and futility, scoffing at good. Every new novelist, composer,and painter-or so we're told-is more 'distrubing' than the last. The good of humanity is left in the hands of politicians. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

2 " Art combines fancy and judgement. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

3 " True criticism praises true art for what it does-praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible-and denounces false art for its failure to do art's proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

4 " Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic game, for those who have the wit to take it seriously, because our side must lose; a comic game-or so a troll might say-because only a clown with sawdust brains would take our side and eagerly join in. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

5 " The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net. This, not the world seen directly, is his raw material. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

6 " True art imitates nature's total process: endless blind experiment (fish that climb tress, hands with nine fingers, shifts in and out of tonality) and then ruthless selectivity-the artist's sober judgements, like a lion's, of what can be killed, what is better left alone, such as (for the lion) rhinos and certain nasty snakes. Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say. That is art's morality. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

7 " True art is too complex to reflect the party line. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

8 " Only in lament does the artist cry out, 'Birds build but not I build," and the lament points to how things out to be: art builds; it never stands pat; it destroys only evil. If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation. This, I have claimed, is what true art is about-preservation of the world of gods and men. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

9 " We are rich in schools which speak of how art 'works' and avoid the whole subject of what work it ought to do. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

10 " Structuralists, formalists, linguistic philosophers who tell us that works of art are like trees-simply objects for perception-all avoid on principle the humanistic questions: who will this work of art help? what baby is it squashing? The business of criticism has become definition, morality reduced to the positivist ideal of clarity. The trouble is that clarity on the wrong subject can be dangerously misleading, as when we define Count Fosco's crocodile as a smiling animal weighing four hundred pounds. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

11 " We need to stop excusing mediocre and downright pernicious art, stop 'taking it for what it’s worth' as we take our fast foods, our overpriced cars that are no good, the overpriced houses we spend all our lives fixing, our television programs, our schools thrown up like barricades in the way of young minds, our brainless fat religions, our poisonous air, our incredible cult of sports, and our ritual of fornicating with all pretty or even horse-faced strangers. We would not put up with a debauched king, but in a democracy all of us are kings, and we praise debauchery as pluralism. This book is of course no condemnation of pluralism; but it is true that art is in one sense fascistic: it claims, on good authority, that some things are healthy for individuals and society and some things are not. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

12 " It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men grew smaller. The wisdom god, Woden, went out to the king of the trolls, got him in an armlock, and demanded to know of him how order might triumph over chaos.
"Give me your left eye," said the king of the trolls, "and I'll tell you."
Without hesitation, Woden gave up his left eye. "Now tell me."
The troll said, "The secret is, Watch with both eyes! "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

13 " In a world where nearly everything that passes for art is tinny and commercial and often, in addition, hollow and academic, I argue--by reason and by banging the table--for an old-fashioned view of what art is and does and what the fundamental business of critics ought therefore to be. Not that I want joy taken out of the arts; but even frothy entertainment is not harmed by a touch of moral responsibility, at least an evasion of too fashionable simplifications. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

14 " The critic's proper business is explanation and evaluation, which means he must make use of his analytic powers to translate the concrete to the abstract. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

15 " True art is a conduit between body and soul, between feeling unabstracted and abstraction unfelt. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

16 " Art gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

17 " As a general rule, the artist who begins with a doctrine to promulgate, instead of a rabble multitude of ideas and emotions, is beaten before he starts. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

18 " ...art deals, at its best, with what has never been observed, or observed only peripherally-darts from what is to what might have been-asking with total interest and sobriety such questions as 'what if apple trees could talk?' or 'what if the haughty old woman next door should fall in love with Mr. Powers, our mailman?' The artist's imagination, or the world it builds, is the laboratory of the unexperienced, both the heroic and the unspeakable. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

19 " True art, by specific technical means now commonly forgotten, clarifies life, establishes models of human action, casts nets toward the future, carefully judges our right and wrong directions, celebrates and mourns. It does not rant. It does not sneer or giggle in the face of death, it invents prayers and weapons. It designs visions worth trying to make fact. It does not whimper or cower or throw up its hands and bat its lashes. It does not make hope contingent on acceptance of some religious theory. It strikes like lightening, or is lightning; whichever. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction

20 " Only in lament does the artist cry out, 'Birds build but not I build," and the lament points to how things ought to be: art builds; it never stands pat; it destroys only evil. If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation. This, I have claimed, is what true art is about-preservation of the world of gods and men. "

― John Gardner , On Moral Fiction