Only meaningful pictures can depict the ends justifying the means. Good paintings often underestimate their own potential and achievements.
Cleopatra is dead and art is a revolt against death.
He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a man who is alive.
Seneca
”Give me to drink mandragora that I might sleep out this great gap of time, my Antony is away.
Shakespeare: Anthony and Cleopatra.
For a statistician, life and death are synonyms, check it by looking for "life insurance" on the internet. Life is a metaphor for death. Postmodernism is a metaphor for Post Modernism.
I think that museums today are conserving not only art objects, but the purpose of the art. If your project is a copy of Marcel Duchamp, there is a frog in your art project.
The end is not the end.
Hans Belting
We are trapped in our past, filtered through the museums of the present.
Used to be only for decorative purpose, but if old enough, it's great art because if something works, even an iconoclast inkblot, it becomes more beautiful.
History, it seems, is always ending today.
Science 4 January 2013: Vol. 339 no. 6115 pp. 96-98
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow,
Shakespeare, The tragedy of Macbeth, Scene V; Shakespeare is still relevant because we have not changed as people.
It is clear that there is more than a kernel of truth to the notion that silly thoughts are intrinsic to the manufacturing of whimsy art.
No society will ever survive if its art dies.
Ernst Gombrich