A Quote by R. O. Blechman

In the mid-fifties, a revolution occurred and a new word entered the vocabulary of commercial art. Concept... But the change was not entirely good. Our gain was also a loss... There was great value in something well observed and carefully delineated. If the head and heart were often absent, there was something to be said for the presence of a hand.
My hand is entirely the implement of a distant sphere. It is not my head that functions but something else, something higher, something somewhere remote. I must have great friends there, dark as well as bright. They are all very kind to me.
We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical.
'Commercial' is not the word that has to be said only by CEOs. It has to be something that is maybe the essence of design, because design has some sort of art in it and creation, but it's also some object that you have to use. There is also this pragmatic end to it.
A Fox entered the house of an actor and, rummaging through all his properties, came upon a Mask, an admirable imitation of a human head. He placed his paws on it and said, "What a beautiful head! Yet it is of no value, as it entirely lacks brains."
People sometimes get ideas about us that are not of our creation. Journalists, for instance, have always wanted us to be something we're not. They've said that we have a big student fan-base, but that's simply not true. We have loads of older fans as well. Increasingly, ladies in their mid-fifties seem to like us.
Calculating people are contemptable. The reason for this is that calculation deals with loss and gain, and the loss and gain mind never stops. Death is considered loss and life is considered gain. Thus, death is something that such a person does not care for, and he is contemptable. Furthermore, scholars and their like are men who with wit and speech hide their own true cowardice and greed. People often misjudge this.
It always ended up that they said, 'Tony, are Frosted Flakes good?' And he would laugh and say, 'Good? Why, they're great.' And I said, 'Well, we've gotta do something with the word 'great' to make It explode. It has to really knock the packages off the shelves.'
Change was as much about loss as gain, about giving something up even as you reached for something new or different. The world was opening up, not closing in.
I never approved of talkies. Silent movies were well on their way to developing an entirely new art form. It was not just pantomine, but something wonderfully expressive.
First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I'm inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word "revolution" loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind.
These ways to make people buy were strange and new to us, and many bought for the sheer pleasure at first of holding in the hand and talking of something new. And once this was done, it was like opium, we could no longer do without this new bauble, and thus, though we hated the foreigners and though we knew they were ruining us, we bought their goods. Thus I learned the art of the foreigners, the art of creating in the human heart restlessness, disquiet, hunger for new things, and these new desires became their best helpers.
If something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity.
As technology progresses, and as it advances, many of us assume that these advances make us more intelligent, make us smarter and more connected to the world. And what I'd like to argue is that that's not necessarily the case, as 'progress' is simply a word for change, and with change you gain something, but you also lose something.
The world that seemed so various and new, well, it does contract. One's burning desire to investigate human behavior, and to make, or imply, statements about it, does fall off. And so one does find that early works are full of energy and also full of vulgarity, crudity, and incompetence, and later works are more carefully finished, and in that sense better literary products. But . . . there's often a freshness that is missing in later works--for every gain there's a loss. I think it evens out in that way.
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
My advice for an aspiring astronaut is to really follow your passion. I mean, study something that interests you, but also qualifies you to apply. NASA recruits from a wide variety of backgrounds. I know people who have applied to be an astronaut who ask me, well should I do this or should I do that. And I said, you know, it doesn't matter. The basic requirements are you have to be in good health, and you have to have a good heart, I mean in a technical way, not to be a kind person, well that helps. Study something that you like and do well in it.
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