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Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.
--
Chapter 3, The Golden Horde, p. 58

 

Lewis H. Lapham

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I was writing a lot of lyrics five or six years ago and the name Marilyn Manson, I thought really describes everything that I had to say, you know, male and female, beauty and ugliness, and it was just very American. It was a statement on the American culture, the power that we give to icons like Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson and since that's where it's always gone from there. It's about the paradox. Diametrically opposed archetypes and then good.

 

Marilyn Manson

 

When I came back to Paris in 1931, after a long convalescence in the South, the 'Abstraction-Création' group had just be founded. Vantongerloo had been given our mailing list. At the same time I learned of Van Doesburg's death in Davos. The first issue of 'Abstraction-Création' came off the press just a year later, printed in the same dusty small shop that had brought out 'Cercle et Carré' and where I had earned a meagre living as a non-union proof-reader and make-up man. 'Abstraction-Création' had a much wider influence than its predecessor. From 1932 to 1936 an annual cahier presented reproductions and statements by painters.

 

Michel Seuphor

 

When you're interested in somebody, and you think they might be interested in you, you should point out all your beauty problems and defects right away, rather than take a chance they won't notice them...On the other hand, say you have a purely temporary beauty problem—a new pimple, lackluster hair, no-sleep eyes, five extra pounds around the middle. Still, whatever it is, you should point it out...If you don't point out these things they might think that your temporary beauty problem is a permanent beauty problem...If they really do like you for yourself, they'll be willing to use their imagination to think of what you must look like without your temporary beauty problem.

 

Andy Warhol

 

I arrived at length at Cairo, mother of cities and seat of Pharaoh the tyrant, mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands, boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour, the meeting-place of comer and goer, the halting-place of feeble and mighty, whose throngs surge as the waves of the sea, and can scarce be contained in her for all her size and capacity."

 

Ibn Battuta

 

"From all points in Manhattan one could look to the South and see a huge plume of smoke hovering over the rubble where two towers once stood, two majestic American symbols representing both commerce in the free world and Democracy. Buildings that transcended width and height, real estate value and a prestigious office address. These towers spelled America, they spelled your name and mine. "

 

Gregory Barbaccia