When I was little, on the 7th November my mother and I once went to see my gran’s sister. Back in 1980s, this day was celebrated as the day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. In the even...
Francesco Petrarca (or Petrarch) is well-known to us as one of the major Italian poets, one of the “three fountains” of Italian Renaissance poetry as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio are some...
Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. ...
The question of art is not a question of spontaneous feelings. It is not a question of emotionality, but of the knowledge of how to make things, how to realise something consciously. Everything functi...
“Time will say nothing, but I told you so/ Time only knows the price we have to pay“, soberly reflected Wystan Hugh Auden in his well-known poem. Diane Arbus, when working on a feature for...
As if to once again ascertain the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, here is one of his Prophecies: Of the selling of Paradise: “A countless multitude will sell publicly and without hindrance things o...
The paintings on the left and right are titled, respectively, My First Sermon (1863) and My Second Sermon (1864). They were painted by one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Sir John E...
I pondered a lot on the problem I have with identifying myself or other people in one way or another. The generic “identity-search”, to which we are so often subjected these days, is usual...
I‘ve just read and went through Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph , picking up many valuable quotes. In the few of them below Arbus discusses the intriguing gap between intention and effect, as...
Back in 1946 (that’s 62 years ago) George Mikes, the author of the undying classic of How To Be An Alien, in the chapter titled How Not To Be Clever, observed, with the usual for the book irony,...