Word: often
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...largely centered on sex, but the failure of contemporary art, especially public sculpture--for most sculpture has always been public--to find especial satisfaction and success in depicting the human form points toward a loss of feeling for the plastics of human beauty. What seems to intrigue us often is a sort of peeping-tom attitude, that seems to offer delight in a sort of pseudo-wickedness, yet is extremely embarrassed by acknowledgement of the physical facts. Clark refreshingly does not share this attitude nor disparage the sensual aspects of the art of the nude. "No nude, however abstract, should...
This "truth" of the nude is reenforced by the knowledge that human beauty is transitory. The Greeks felt that the human figure in its prime is the highest subject of art, but not, one suspects, from the unbalanced optimism about the powers of man for which they are often given credit, but from a sense of tragedy of the mortal before the immortal and of the fleetingness of youth and happiness...
These problems which he delinates seem to be most central to any study of aesthetics or culture, and his often quite modest conclusions, offer food for thought, though not to be taken without careful examination. The work seems sure to become something of a classic. It is richly rewarding and provocative reading which illuminates and makes explicit a part of the world too seldom looked at with the full light of intelligence and that is critical to an understanding of what we are in physical terms, an appreciation which seems very distant from us, and yet Clark's words ring...
...Politics and the English Language" he analyzed its abuses, observing that cliches "perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself." The abuse of language by recourse to ready-made phrases is the most obvious and often the first of attempts to create the "reduced state of consciousness" which, Orwell later wrote, "is favorable to political conformity...
...event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.... This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world...