Many many thanks to everyone who has supported Gilded Birds so far. Have a wonderful 2014!
The most popular posts of 2013 were:
“I think for me beauty comes from the inside, not the outside, it radiates. It’s an energy that gives off a kind of glow. It’s the same with people and objects. Every good work of art has this energy. It’s like when you walk into a room and feel strangely as though someone’s looking at you. In a museum you can sense something behind you, pulling you, and you turn around to see it. This is a great work of art because it has that energy. The creator gave it an inner beauty.”
“I tend to see beauty in simplicity and symmetry. I like rectilinear forms that can be captured by equations that I understand. I know that the highest beauty would be in something like King Lear and I can dimly grasp that but if I were the emperor of the world there would be no buildings by Zaha Hadid. It would always be obvious where the entrance to a building was because it would be symmetrically located. I’d banish Frank Gehry to the ninth circle of hell. I would probably have all the impressionist canvases burned! It’s a form of higher philistinism. I wish I weren’t like that but it’s the mixture of genes I got and people who are attracted to the mysterious and the sublime and the messy and the complicated have a more interesting sense of beauty than I do. But you work with what you’re given.”
“The Park was designed to give people who couldn’t get there that same experience of being in nature. So the park provides an experience of beauty and is also, as you say, driven by a remarkable intellectual idea: the democratic idea of an experience of beauty for the people. Moreover, you have the extraordinarily obsessive and creative execution, down to the finest detail, of that intellectual idea.”
“Beauty to me in music can be violent, ugly or fast or urgent, not necessarily slow or pretty. The reason to make music to me is because I’m looking for something I can’t find – that I feel like I might have heard in a dream or something. In a way though, the most beautiful things that come are the simple ones, the ideas that come and sit on your shoulder and don’t piss off, but could be so obvious you might miss them unless you’re looking.”
GILDED BIRDS 