Tag Archives: art

François Truffaut

Il y a deux sortes de metteurs en scène : ceux qui tiennent compte du public en concenvant puis en réalisant leurs films et ceux qui n’en tiennent pas compte. Pour les premiers, le cinéma est un art du spectacle, pour les seconds, une aventure individuelle. Il n’a pas à préférer ceux-ci ou ceux-là, c’est ainsi. Pour Hitchcock comme pour Renoir, comme d’ailleurs pour presque tous les metteurs en scène américains, un film n’est pas réussi s’il n’a pas de succès, c’est-à-dire s’il ne touche pas le public à qui l’on a constamment pensé depuis le moment où l’on a choisi le sujet jusq’au terme de la réalisation. Alors que Bresson, Tati, Rossellini, Nicholas Ray, tournent les films à leur manière et demandent ensuite au public de vouloir bien entrer « dans leur jeu », Renoir, Clouzot, Hitchcock, Hawks font leus films pour le public, en se posant continuellement des questions afin d’être certains d’eintéresser les futurs spectateurs.

François Truffaut, Les films de ma vie, Paris, 1975, p. 104

Joseph Schumpeter

A leader of still another type might be mentioned here, Carlyle. For economists he is one of the most important and most characteristic figures in the cultural panorama of that epoch—standing in heroic pose, hurling scorn at the materialistic littleness of his age, cracking a whip with which to flay, among other things, our Dismal Science. This is how he saw himself and how his time saw and loved to see him. Completely incapable of understanding the meaning of a theorem, overlooking the fact that all science is ‘dismal’ to the artist, he thought he had got hold of the right boy to whip. A large part of the public applauded, and so did some economists who understood no more than he did what a ‘science’ is and does.

Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, London, 1954, pp. 386-387

Peter Singer

[T]he sums that the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA have spent and are planning to spend on their extensions and renovations would have done more good if they had been used to restore or preserve the sight of people too poor to pay for such treatment themselves. I am not suggesting that these museums should have done that. They were set up for a different purpose, and to use their funds to help the global poor would presumably be a breach of their founding deeds or statutory obligations, and would invite litigation from past donors who could perceive it as a violation of the purposes for which they had donated. (Perhaps, though, the museums could justify, as part of their mission, restoring sight in people who would then be able to visit and appreciate the art they display?)

Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically, New Haven, 2015, chap. 11