A Quote by Mason Cooley

Now defined as art, the totem has lost cult, taboo, and custom.

Mason Cooley

Quote Topics

Art Cult Custom Defined Lost Now Taboo Totem

Quote Author

Mason Cooley
American - Writer
1927 - 2002

The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex.

Sigmund Freud

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.

Roger Scruton

Near Marseilles in the south of France, bouillabaisse is a cult food. In Toulouse and Carcassonne, the bean-based stew cassoulet is a cult food. Spain has paella and a number of others. Italy has so many, its cuisine is practically defined by them.

Nathan Myhrvold

There was a taboo as a result of the Holocaust that people respected that anti-Semitism was an ugly thing and should be avoided. Now that taboo seems to have been broken with impunity.

Steven T. Katz

The great art of the past became great because it started to go out of the perimeters that defined art and defined new territories.

Ludovico Einaudi

I'm a cult writer now. I have a cult readership.

Michael Gruber

I don't think it takes much for a cult to be a cult. Many parts of our society are cultish, and you only need a charismatic leader and some teachings, and before you know it, you have a cult.

Jerome Flynn

I like money but I love performance art and it goes hand in hand. I'm not the 'Titanic,' I'm 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.' I'm not a blockbuster, I'm a cult classic. I think my strong but cult-like fanbase expects me to challenge norms.

Sharon Needles

I feel like sometimes, when I talk about 'Transparent,' I'm in a cult. And in some ways, I guess I sort of am, although it's a cult that pays me, and I don't pay it, so maybe that's a really good cult.

Amy Landecker

O fairest of creation, last and best Of all God's works, creature in whom excelled Whatever can to sight or thought be formed, Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet! How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, Defaced, deflow'red, and now to death devote? Paradise Lost

John Milton

To be involved with movies that become kind of cult classics... I've been very fortunate. 'The Warriors' is certainly a cult classic, and 'Xanadu' is, to a certain degree, a cult classic as well.

Michael Beck

Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture.

Frantz Fanon

I would say that Jesus Christ and his followers were a cult, Buddha and his followers were a cult and Mohammed and his followers were a cult. Every religion starts out as a cult and if it becomes 'box office', it is accepted.

Frederick Lenz

There is the cult of the actor and of the director, and there's even been the cult of the celebrity chef and gardener, but there has never been a cult of the screenwriter. But I'm happy about that because what I crave - in a completely venal way - is creative opportunities, not recognition.

Anthony McCarten

Every family had its own peculiar cult, to which no stranger was ever admitted, and which alone could appease and satisfy the gods of that family. The cult was handed down from father to son, from generation to generation, and could not be lost without condemning the whole series of ancestors to eternal misery.