1 “A manifesto is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretension is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis. It may be pleasant, and good-natured, it’s always right, it’s stong, vigorous and logical.
Apropos of logic, I consider myself very likeable.”
– Tristan Tzara, Feeble Love & Bitter Love, II
2 “Multi-media, cacophony, abusiveness, dreams, children’s games, drugs, psychedelia, automatic writing, nonsense and a-syntactical poetry, caligrams, violently incongruous images and surprise effects all are declared legitimate in the attempt to break down conventionalized responses to words, to defeat the censorship which the surface areas of the personality, the conscious intellect and the will, had imposed upon the profounder levels of the psyche.”
– Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane
3 “..these four causes concurring, viz., 1. admiration of the ancients; 2. emnity to the schoolmen; 3. an exact study of languages; and, 4. a desire of powerful preaching – introduced an affected study of eloquence and copiousness of speech, which then began to flourish. This soon grew to excess, in so much that men studied more after words than matter, more after the choiceness of phrase, and the round and neat composition, sweet cadence of periods, the use of tropes and figures, than after weight of matter, dignity of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement.”
– Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
4 “Here is an illustration. You are looking right now at a set of dark marks on paper. This pattern of black-on-white symbols reaches your eyes by reflected light, and activates the nerve cells in the retina, the light-sensing layer of nerve cells at the back of your eyeball. The result is a set of nerve impulses, which are transferred to your brain’s vision centres for processing.”
– David Ritchie
5 “Hence, once again, pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.”
– Frederic Jameson
