Music may yet be unborn. Perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever.
Charles Ives, Essays before a Sonata (1920)
I reject the argument that ornament increases the pleasures of life of a cultivated person, or that it is beautiful. I prefer undecorated gingerbread. Modern people will understand.
Adolf Loos, Ornament & Crime
In place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.
- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
