Famous quotes containing the words smithsonian, american and/or art:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“To the man who loves art for its own sake,... it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)