A Quote by Betty Edwards

Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information. — © Betty Edwards
Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information.
Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You're also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to; art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.
Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn't get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn't art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn't art.
Expressing emotion is not so easy. He has to remind himself that English is not her first language. Expressing emotion can be difficult even when the words are familiar.
The visual information of art history is going to students seamlessly, without the enormous trouble those of us who are older had when we studied art history many years ago.
Rather than thinking of sound and sense in my essays as two opposing principles, two perpendicular trajectories, as they are often considered in conversations around translation, or even as two disassociated phenomena that can be brought together to collaborate with more or less success, I think of sound as sense. Sound has its own meaning, and it's one of the many non-semantic dimensions of meaning in language. I want to emphasize is the formal dynamic between language-as-information and language-as-art-material.
Making music and art is about expressing something that's universally human, maybe even beyond human, at best. To make it about the artist and to dwell upon biographical information can only make it singular, and I am really, really disgusted by that.
Art history is fine. I mean, that's a discipline. Art history is art history, and you start from the beginning and you end up in artist in time. But art is a little bit different. Art is a conversation. And if there's no conversation, what the hell is it about?
Predating the Internet and predating videos, you had an active imagination. You would hear sounds and then get mental pictures of what these sounds felt like to you. It engaged you and made you more invested in it. It made you want to get tickets to the show, buy the album, put the poster on the wall. Now it's sensory overload.
We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.
In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.
In truth, factual information - names or dates - have never interested me much. Those things are like an alien language that can interfere with the language of the painting, or even prevent its emergence.
Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.
No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.
I think that I would really like at first for the art to speak for itself. I don't see the need for a lot of personal information about my past or who I am. I would rather the personal side of it just be in the concepts and the genuine feelings that I filter through my work. I know that it's inevitable that people can find whatever they want about me. Once I've had a chance to create a language and a world with my art, then I'm more comfortable sharing that information.
It wasn't very long ago when you wouldn't even think about there being health information on the smartphone. There's financial information. There's your conversations; there's business secrets. There's probably more information about you on here than exists in your home.
Many people with autism struggle with reading nonverbal cues and acting on them. When you lose that ability to understand and process nonverbal cues, you're at a huge disadvantage socially.
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