18 August 2009

Quote of the day

How repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure, our 'educated' people, our rich people, and our rulers! How maliciously we listen now to the big county-fair boom-boom with which the 'educated' person and city dweller today permits art, books, and music to rape him and provide 'spiritual pleasures' – with the aid of spirituous liquors!

How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses have become, which the educated mob loves, and all its aspirations after the elevated, inflated, and exaggerated! No, if we convalescents still need art, it is another kind of art – a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies. Above all, an art for artists, for artists only!

We know better afterward what above all is needed for this: cheerfulness, any cheerfulness, my friends – also as artists: let me prove it. There are a few things we now know too well, we knowing ones: oh, how we now learn to forget well, and to be good at not knowing, as artists!

- Friedrich Nietzsche (the first dada), Preface to the second edition of The gay science

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