9 Quotes by Christopher S. Wood

Art is innovation, and its history cannot be written except from a distance sufficiently great to perceive form and form-ratio. One might answer that art today is still an incessant violation of codes. But how are those violations legible if no one code ever settles into common use, that is, starts to behave like a language or another convention-based system for getting things done; like a style, in other words? There can be no artistic innovation unless someone else is not innovating.

Art is the direct confrontation between an irreducible individual soul, unreachable by society, and the facts of nature and human nature. The critic, not the connoisseur, reconstructs this confrontation.

Art is the place where the points in time that reason holds apart are reunited.

It was the doomed competition with photography that had led painting to lose its ways in the mindless transcription of reality. Admittedly the scorn for realism had been a traditional theme of premodern art theory, often mapped onto onto a geographic distinction. The direct imitation of reality was the northern European weakness, a limitation to be countered by an idealism cultivated in the Mediterranean realm.

Riegl also solved a paradox of academic doctrine, wedded to the ideal: its tendency to summon its own subversion by reality, or by lowly life. Now that the story line is the movement from touch-based art to vision-based art, the future is open-ended, for art can always be further intellectualized without worrying about a surfeit of sublimity or transcendence, just as low subject matter does not threaten to drag art back into the weeds of practical life.

History is not a conversation with the past, Instead, in Warburg, memory is carried forward to us, objectively, by the sequence of pathos-formulas. We do not choose our past, it chooses us. This was not an entirely direful story. The pathos-formulas register danger but they also ward it off, apotropaically. Art creates the psychic distance that gives mankind a chance in its struggle with hostile nature or with the gods.

As is so often the case, shapings of history designed to bring out lost sources of vitality call upon fictions of ethnicity or race as their medium.

Humanism was not a loss of confidence either in art or in art's capacity to exceed historical scholarship. For Panofsky humanism meant dedication to a balanced ideal of human nature. As such, it was a formal concept. Humanism sees asymmetries and imbalances in human nature as deformations. Humanism is the form classicism takes after the discrediting of the Idea.

Symbol-laden and technologically-driven histories of building were historically interwoven and conceptually compatible. National Socialism adopted just this convergence of the symbolic and the technological as a program, and this made it impossible ever after to pursue such a program.