Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains. By contrast, it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter
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There’s nothing harder in the world than making art, particularly when no one understands it.
~ Gustave Courbet
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The most stimulating parts of this region are not the cities of Lijiang or Shangri-La, but the more remote Tibetan areas. Tibetans have been subject to decades of forced assimilation to Han culture, but they still find room to practice small acts of subversion. One guide told me, for example, that monks have slipped a portrait of the Dalai Lama behind the portrait of the Panchen Lama in their monastery, allowing them to pray in good conscience.
~ Dan Wang via his 2022 letter
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Along with painters like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko is considered one of the principal artists of the New York School, which radically changed American art after World War II.
~ Elisabetta Povoledo via The New York Times
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In our civilized society I must lead the life of a savage. I must free myself even from governments. My sympathies lies with the people; I must go to them directly. I must draw my wisdom from them, and they must give me life. For that reason I have just embarked on the grand, independent and vagabond life of the bohemian.
~ Gustave Courbet
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Painting can not, without falling into abstraction, let a partial aspect of art dominate, whether it be drawing, color, composition, or any other one of the extraordinary multiplicity of means the totality of which alone constitutes this art.
~ Gustave Courbet
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