america
“Ugliness can be shocking, it can have impact—like a man spitting in your face: but it can also be given beauty by a sensitive photographer. Frank is sensitive, but apparently he is without love. There is no pity in his images. They are images of hate and hopelessness, of desolation and preoccupation with death.
Just a moment...
“A Kind of Patriotism”: Jack Kerouac’s Introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959) in: Writing and Seeing
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Twelve Acres — HENRY O. HEAD
henryohead.com
It is primarily we intellectuals and elites who culture shop, picking and choosing what works best for us. That's true in Europe and the US, where each group of elites is inoculated from the least admirable qualities. Well-to-do Americans can escape the banal landscapes, either through travel or by living in the exclusive US neighborhoods that share European qualities, and find belonging in communities formed from their careers that cross national and cultural boundaries. Highly motivated Europeans can move to America, or work in a large corporation and escape European provincialism, while not giving up the aesthetic and communal benefits it offers.
“Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it.
We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what
enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance
piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's
unintentional. It arose independent of human
... See moreAmerican culture: simple, pure and truthful = dumb
European culture: pursuit and awareness of refinement = snobbish
Bent on mobility, and having the space for it, we have spent our short history in a series of major transitions.
Underlying those changes has always been a sense of urgency.
Our mobility was never peaceful, serene or dignified. but hasty and impelled by a sense of insecurity (Nathaniel Owings, American Aesthetic)
nation as part of a mosaic of interlocking geophysical forma-tions, each with its own special utility, then perhaps we can see dimly for the future the re-creation of the American Dream. (Nathaniel Owings, American Aesthetic)
As American a picture – the faces don’t editorialise or criticise or say anything but: “This is the way we are in real life and if you don’t like it I don’t know anything about it ’cause I’m living my own life my way, and may God bless us all mebbe ... if we deserve it”’
‘It changed 20th-century art’: revisiting Robert Frank’s The Americans – in pictures
kerouac about robert frank’s americans