I like to be buttoned onto tradition. The thing is to improve it, twist it and mold it; to make something new of it; not to deny it. The riches of history can be plucked at any point.
Interpretation
Tradition should be embraced and enhanced rather than rejected.
In this quote, Philip Johnson emphasizes the importance of tradition in creative endeavors. He suggests that one should not simply adhere to tradition but instead take it as a foundation to innovate and create something new, thereby celebrating the richness of history while contributing to its evolution.
In practice
In a speech about modern art, you could use this quote to highlight the value of tradition in artistic innovation.
Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.
I like the thought that what we are to do on this earth is embellish it for its greater beauty, so that oncoming generations can look back to the shapes we leave here and get the same thrill that I get in looking back at theirs - at the Parthenon, at Chartres Cathedral.
The future of architecture is culture.
Architecture is art, nothing else.
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
Music is the weapon. Music is the weapon of the future.
I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren't just about keeping our job and making a buck - important though those things are. Arts programming isn't some sort of add-on or ornamental luxury.
The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.
Look, people are allowed their own opinions and they don't always coincide with yours. As an artist you just have to keep plugging on.
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