The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.
Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
When information rubs against information the results are startling and effective. The perrenial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.
In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.
The copy of an ad is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the product goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.
As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.
The medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the search and form of human associations and action.
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message
A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
The 'expert' is the man who stays put.
Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
Even mud gives the illusion of depth.
Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.
The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.
I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.
To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.
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