“White Star,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

In an artistic sense, cool came to refer to someone with a signature artistic style so integral as to exude an authentic mode-of-being in the world:  Miles, Bogart, Brando, Eastwood, Greco, Elvis, Lady Day, Sinatra.  Such a person created something from nothing and gave the world some new artistic or psychological “equipment for living,” to use a phrase of Kenneth Burke’s.  A signature style is yours and can only be carried by you:  it cannot be abstracted except through dilution and commodification since it reflects an individual’s complex personal experience.

Joel Dinerstein in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America    

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