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How to think of art…

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.

Brian Eno (via BrainPickings)

“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to
be accepted by others. You need to be yourself.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

“Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.”

― Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

(via Sean Sharp)

It is quite possible to leave your home for a walk in the early morning air and return a different person – beguiled, enchanted.

— Mary Ellen Chase

“My favorite authors are the ones living, dead, read and unread, published and unpublished, who write because they can’t stop and because something inside them burns to be outside. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to read their books, but they are all and every one my favorites.”

Cory Doctorow