Manik✨
mhenryHis friend Bobby kinda stole it:
“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.” – Jean-Michel Basquiat
Packbats, HTML fangirls ΘΔ&@916string @manikrathee oh, interesting - I'm going digging and I can't find a citation for Jean-Michel Basquiat (or Alex Hutchings), but I can find a citation for Frank Zappa (or possibly his coauthor Peter Occhiogrosso) in The Real Frank Zappa Book:
A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time. Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
Would love if a real quote investigator could dig into this and find something more definite...
Zappa is how I knew the quote. I saw the Zappa quote on the place that shall not be named (r/Zappa) and one of the replies had the Basquiat quote. I Googled it and verified the Basquiat quote.
Zappa was probably expounding on Basquiat.
And, of course, a lot of people have quotes attributed to them that aren’t theirs.
@916string @manikrathee a*ha!* so where did Basquiat say it?
No idea. And it could be that he stole it from Zappa. But that exact quote has been attributed to Basquiat and the one about paying bills to Zappa.
I did try to find who said it first, but can’t really find anything definitive. Then again, I spent about 5 minutes before giving up.
Like you said, this requires a real researcher. I prefer to keep my amateur standing.
@916string yeah, legit
our rule of thumb is: if a quote should have a source - like, a specific interview, book, diary entry, whatever - and it doesn't have that source, then we haven't confirmed it yet
and, like, it makes sense to us from other quote investigations we've seen that the Zappa quote would metamorphosize into the Twitter screenshot quote by way of people misremembering a quote into being a more polished form of itself ... but it could also have gone the other way, by Zappa referencing a quote to say something else
hence the need for a real sleuth