Intrinsic Value Art Quotes

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Art doesn't need to be good to be valuable. I've heard it said that art is the truly useless creation - intended for no mechanical purpose. Valued only because of the perception of the people who view it. The thing is, everything is useless, intrinsically. Nothing has value unless we grant it that value. Any object can be worth whatever we decide it to be worth.

In Ranec’s eye the finest and most perfect example of anything was beautiful, and anything beautiful was the finest and most perfect example of spirit; it was the essence of it. That was his religion. Beyond that, at the core of his aesthetic soul, he felt that beauty had an intrinsic value of its own, and he believed there was a potential for beauty in everything. While some activities or objects could be simply functional, he felt that anyone who came close to achieving perfection in any activity was an artist, and the results contained the essence of beauty. But the art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.

And so all great music, great prose, everything beautiful must depend upon the sure, free measure with which it is gardened and put into language for the people, for each lovely thing has its intrinsic value and belongs in its own position for the world to study, understand and thrive upon.

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature--the qualities of space and time--in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.

But aesthetic value does not rise from the work's apparent ability to predict a future: we do not admire Cézanne because of the Cubists drew on him. Value rises from deep in the work itself - from its vitality, its intrinsic qualities, its address to the senses, intellect, and imagination; from the uses it makes of the concrete body of tradition. In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity. Not even the greatest doctor in Bologna in the 17th century knew as much a bout the human body as today's third-year medical student. But nobody alive today can draw as well as Rembrandt or Goya.

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake. What purports to be art begins to looks like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalized action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself, it serves another, higher, and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of human calling.

I find that most people serve practical needs. They have an understanding of the difference between meaning and relevance. And at some level my mind is more interested in meaning than in relevance. That is similar to the mind of an artist. The arts are not life. They are not serving life. The arts are the cuckoo child of life. Because the meaning of life is to eat. You know, life is evolution and evolution is about eating. It's pretty gross if you think about it. Evolution is about getting eaten by monsters. Don't go into the desert and perish there, because it's going to be a waste. If you're lucky the monsters that eat you are your own children. And eventually the search for evolution will, if evolution reaches its global optimum, it will be the perfect devourer. The thing that is able to digest anything and turn it into structure to sustain and perpetuate itself, for long as the local puddle of negentropy is available. And in a way we are yeast. Everything we do, all the complexity that we create, all the structures we build, is to erect some surfaces on which to out compete other kinds of yeast. And if you realize this you can try to get behind this and I think the solution to this is fascism. Fascism is a mode of organization of society in which the individual is a cell in the superorganism and the value of the individual is exactly the contribution to the superorganism. And when the contribution is negative then the superorganism kills it in order to be fitter in the competition against other superorganisms. And it's totally brutal. I don't like fascism because it's going to kill a lot of minds I like. And the arts is slightly different. It's a mutation that is arguably not completely adaptive. It's one where people fall in love with the loss function. Where you think that your mental representation is the intrinsically important thing. That you try to capture a conscious state for its own sake, because you think that matters. The true artist in my view is somebody who captures conscious states and that's the only reason why they eat. So you eat to make art. And another person makes art to eat. And these are of course the ends of a spectrum and the truth is often somewhere in the middle, but in a way there is this fundamental distinction. And there are in some sense the true scientists which are trying to figure out something about the universe. They are trying to reflect it. And it's an artistic process in a way. It's an attempt to be a reflection to this universe. You see there is this amazing vast darkness which is the universe. There's all these iterations of patterns, but mostly there is nothing interesting happening in these patterns. It's a giant fractal and most of it is just boring. And at a brief moment in the evolution of the universe there are planetary surfaces and negentropy gradients that allow for the creation of structure and then there are some brief flashes of consciousness in all this vast darkness. And these brief flashes of consciousness can reflect the universe and maybe even figure out what it is. It's the only chance that we have. Right? This is amazing. Why not do this? Life is short. This is the thing we can do.

The mentality of today seeks in fact to reduce everything to temporal categories: a work of art, a thought, a truth have no value in themselves and independently of any historical classification, but only as a result of the time in which they are rightly or wrongly placed; everything is considered the expression of a “period”, not of a timeless and intrinsic value, and this is entirely in conformity with modern relativism and with a psychologism or biologism that destroys essential values . This philosophy derives a maximum of originality from what in effect is nothing but a hatred of God; but since it is impossible to abuse directly a God in whom one does not believe, one abuses Him indirectly through the laws of nature , and one goes so far as to disparage the very form of man and his intelligence, the intelligence with which one thinks and abuses. But there is no escaping immanent Truth: “The more he blasphemes,” says Meister Eckhart, “the more he praises God.

In the wake of the British army’s burning of the roughly 3,000 books belonging to Congress at Washington, Jefferson offered to sell the nation his own collection.42 There were 6,487 volumes in Jefferson’s hands; in the words of the National Intelligencer, the library “for its selection, rarity and intrinsic value, is beyond all price.”43,44 They formed the core of the new Library of Congress.

In his book The Economy of Prestige, author and professor James English suggests that awards serve a dual, seemingly contradictory role in society: first, they exist in order to bestow a marker of quality on items (such as films, music, and TV shows) that don’t have any intrinsic value. But awards also create a forum where the value of what awards represent—the commodification of art—can be debated.

A Spinoza in poetry becomes a Machiavelli in philosophy. Mysticism is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings. So long as our scholastic education takes us back to antiquity and furthers the study of the Greek and Latin languages, we may congratulate ourselves that these studies, so necessary for the higher culture, will never disappear. If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that we really became men. The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life. If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature. The classical is health; and the romantic, disease. When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art. For all other Arts we must make some allowance; but to Greek Art alone we are always debtors. The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses. Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion. Art is essentially noble; therefore the artist has nothing to fear from a low or common subject. Nay, by taking it up, he ennobles it; and so it is that we see the greatest artists boldly exercising their sovereign rights. Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago. To praise a man is to put oneself on his level. In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.

When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art. For all other Arts we must make some allowance; but to Greek Art alone we are always debtors. The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses. Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion. Art is essentially noble; therefore the artist has nothing to fear from a low or common subject. Nay, by taking it up, he ennobles it; and so it is that we see the greatest artists boldly exercising their sovereign rights. Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago. In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further. The Classical is health, the Romantic disease.

Ironically, the best litmus test for measuring your vagabonding gumption is found not in travel but in the process of earning your freedom to travel. Earning your freedom, of course, involves work—and work is intrinsic to vagabonding for psychic reasons as much as financial ones. To see the psychic importance of work, one need look no further than people who travel the world on family money. Sometimes referred to as “trustafarians,” these folks are among the most visible and least happy wanderers in the travel milieu. Draping themselves in local fashions, they flit from one exotic travel scene to another, compulsively volunteering in local political causes, experimenting with exotic intoxicants, and dabbling in every non-Western religion imaginable. Talk to them, and they’ll tell you they’re searching for something “meaningful.”   And they say in truth that a man is made of desire. As his desire is, so is his faith. As his faith is, so are his works. As his works are, so he becomes. —THE SUPREME TEACHING OF THE UPANISHADS   What they’re really looking for, however, is the reason why they started traveling in the first place. Because they never worked for their freedom, their travel experiences have no personal reference—no connection to the rest of their lives. They are spending plenty of time and money on the road, but they never spent enough of themselves to begin with. Thus, their experience of travel has a diminished sense of value.

As creativity becomes intertwined with our identity and livelihood, we forget its intrinsic value. We think everything must have a practical purpose – but isn’t life more than a series of accomplishments? We’ve forgotten that pleasure isn’t sinful, and so we scramble for ways to justify that which brings us joy.

Mullinax: This of course gets to the notion of fiction as a separate world, and not as an appendage of some sort to the "real" world. The idea that we should let fiction be fiction, and not philosophy or sociology or psychology. Gass: Right. We've allowed music to be music. Oh we try, of course, to make it out to be something else. We use music in a roundabout way. Music to make love by, all that stuff. But we don't normally go around regarding music as anything more than music, and not as a message to the world or this or that. And we're doing that more and more with poetry. Fiction is slower to get there because it's been attached to doing all these other things. Art shouldn't try to make you do something, or even to produce in the reader a feeling or emotion. Its aim is construction. The artist wants to create an object that has intrinsic value, something worth living with as an end in itself. The artist makes an object he can have a non-utilitarian relation to—a companion.

as people very often place intrinsic value on things outside of their direct control, and doing so undoubtedly contributes to human suffering in many ways.

As the philosopher Kant would later put it: ‘Ought implies can.’ This is an important argument both from a philosophical and psychological perspective, as people very often place intrinsic value on things outside of their direct control, and doing so undoubtedly contributes to human suffering in many ways.

The arts are very much like the Spirit. They are intangible. They are ends in themselves. They have an intrinsic value…. Art, music, and poetry in themselves are priceless. They are unique creations, not serial productions. They are like a gift we give to a loved one, valuable for its own sake. Somehow they escape the limits of time and bring us a foretaste of eternity.  

The real fight is the fight of facts among the facts, not the fight of ideas among ideas or theories among theories. More precisely, only those ideas and approaches, or only those qualities and values that represent the facts and the truth in the best possible way, have the merits that entitle them, to a larger or lesser extent, to the very same facts or truths, proportionately to their value. Since there is no absolute entitlement to the facts or truths, there can be only the entitlement, to a larger or lesser extent, to the acceptance of the values represented by particular ideas, theories, or works of art, depending on their intrinsic values that depict the facts and truths of existence and life itself in the best possible manner and with the highest level of accuracy or beauty in the arts.

The measure of the quality of ideas or scientific achievements is their accuracy or exactness. The standard of value, or quality, in the field of art is the level of “pure beauty” (including intellectual power, wisdom, and ideas containing justified novelty) represented by the intrinsic value of a particular work of art (in its justifiable novelty). Even beauty is the measure, or one of the possible measures, of the realities and facts of life and existence. Even beauty has its dimensions and exactness. The sheer immeasurability of beauty is the measure of its infinite value. We cannot represent, describe, or define the factual state of beauty in a better way than by beauty itself.

Artists sometimes talk about art for art's sake. What they mean is that art has intrinsic worth: it has value in and of itself, apart from any utility. This needs to be said because there are always some people who wonder why we need art, on the assumption that in order to be a legitimate calling it must perform some practical function. But since God has made us to enjoy beauty, art itself is able to nourish our souls.

Take, e. g., that of "a man who, on presenting a leaden coin, receives, by the king's command, a hundred pounds; not as though the leaden coin, by any operation of its own, caused him to be given that sum of money, this being the effect of the mere will of the king/' St. Thomas, who cites this example, justly ob serves: "If we examine the question properly, we shall see that according to the above mode the Sacraments are mere signs; for the leaden coin is nothing but a sign of the king's command that this man should receive money.'' (S. Th., 3a, qu. 62, art. i.) If the simile is really to il lustrate the causality of the Sacraments, it must be changed as follows: Man, in the Sacrament which he receives, presents a gold coin, which, on account of its intrinsic value, morally com pels his sovereign to be liberal.

Art had intrinsic, lasting value and, conveniently for the new owners, it was portable as well. “Art soon became a major factor in the economy,” writes Nicholas, “as everyone with cash, from black marketeers to Hitler, sought safe assets. As the trade heated up, prices rose and family attics were scoured for the Dutch old masters and romantic genre scenes beloved by the conquerors.” For the occupiers, it was a game with a deck stacked in their favor. The Nazis could buy what ever they wanted, with state money, from intimidated sellers. A cadre of eager agents helped them scout out special prizes and “bargain” with the owners.

The quandary was how to make workers efficient and attentive, when their actual labor had been degraded by automation. The motivation previously supplied by the intrinsic satisfactions of manual work was to be replaced with ideology; industrial arts education now concerned itself with moral formation.