{"quotes":[{"text":"The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of the radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world— the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history, has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["artifice","concept-of-history","history","lonely","man","nature","society","the-self"],"id":20479,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"The outfit, tight in places, and loose in some, says as much in the buttons as it does in cuffs.","author":"Kristen Henderson","tags":["artifice","artless-poem","button","clothes","cuffs","fashion","loose","outfist","perfect-poem","persona","tight"],"id":33010,"author_id":"Kristen+Henderson"},{"text":"Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice.","author":"Asti Hustvedt","tags":["artifice","decadence","decadent","illusion","language","literature"],"id":72652,"author_id":"Asti+Hustvedt"},{"text":"…and yet, at the end of it all, a few very broad lines did seem to stick out, like the primary colors in a painting that explain all the confusing blends. And once I had understood my artificial convention, as one understands a convention of the theatre, it was surprising how many adventures did, with a squeeze, fit in their compartments- provided that I chuckled as I did the squeezing and reminded myself that it was all a game anyway.","author":"Joseph J. Thorndike Jr.","tags":["adventure","artifice"],"id":78964,"author_id":"Joseph+J.+Thorndike+Jr."},{"text":"The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. ('I'm Dangerous Tonight').","author":"Cornell Woolrich","tags":["artifice","authenticity","fake"],"id":118908,"author_id":"Cornell+Woolrich"},{"text":"He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced—until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.","author":"Thomas Mann","tags":["acting","actor","appearances","artifice","artificial","decline","family","hollowness","self-conscious"],"id":158122,"author_id":"Thomas+Mann"},{"text":"When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.","author":"Friedrich Nietzsche","tags":["artifice","judgment","maturity","nuance","unconditional","youth"],"id":179311,"author_id":"Friedrich+Nietzsche"},{"text":"Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.","author":"Ali Smith","tags":["anthropocene","artifice","authenticity","pretending","pretense","realness"],"id":295045,"author_id":"Ali+Smith"},{"text":"... The lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.","author":"E.A. Bucchianeri","tags":["artifice","christopher-marlowe","faust","faustian","faustus","grand-plans","imprisionment","imprison","man","mankind","marlowe","mind","philosophical","planning","plans","sad-but-true","when-plans-go-wrong","when-things-fall-apart"],"id":300642,"author_id":"E.A.+Bucchianeri"},{"text":"Actually, no. I won't ever go digital. I work with thirty-five or large format. I like the hand-jobs, you know. And I still do most of my own printing. I've developed such a profound distaste for touch-up and modern artifice—comes from snapping too many derelicts and detritus, perhaps, but I love it. Photo bloody Shop can go stuff it. A picture should be honest, even if the subject is contrived on the ground, you know; not dolled-up for advertising punch or sex appeal.","author":"Pansy Schneider-Horst","tags":["artifice","derelicts","detritus","photography","photoshop"],"id":312532,"author_id":"Pansy+Schneider-Horst"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":15,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}