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"All art is infested by other art"
(Leo Steinberg, Art about Art, 1979)

"I personally don't look for secret messages hidden by Carroll in the text; rather, I look at themes and symbols as potential hints as to the sorts of things that were on Carroll's mind at the time."
(Darien Graham-Smith, 2005-10-05)

"While I concede Tufail's thesis (2003) that Holiday received his instructions from Carroll and created his illustrations to reflect Carroll's cryptic messages and allusions, I contend that the interpretations given to the words we know so well by so many illustrators over a period in excess of 130 years continue to keep the Snark alive. Furthermore, it is my personal belief that Holiday managed to slip in a few interpretations of his own even though Carroll approved of the end result."
(Doug Howick: The Hiihijig of the Bijtcheb, Knight Letter #28, Summer 2009)

"We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses. Concept is divorced from percept, and thought moves among abstractions. Our eyes have been reduced to instruments with which to identify and to measure; hence we suffer a paucity of ideas that can be expressed in images and in an incapacity to discover meaning in what we see. Naturally we feel lost in the presence of objects that make sense only to undeluted vision, and we seek refuge in the more familiar medium of words. ... The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened."
(Rudolf Arnheim: Art and Visual Perception, 1974, p. 1)

"The audience, once it thinks about paintings, turns into a poet, and once it thinks about poems, it turns into a researcher. In the instance when the artist appeals to it, it always lacks of the right sense, that is, it does not lack of the presence of mind, but the lack of the presence of sense."
("Das Publikum wird, wenn es über Gemälde nachdenkt, dabei zum Dichter, und wenn es über Gedichte nachdenkt, zum Forscher. Im Augenblick, da der Künstler es anruft, fehlt im immer am rechten Sinn, also nicht an der Geistes-, sondern an der Sinnesgegenwart.")
Friedrich Nietzsche: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches; Appendix: Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche; 1879

"Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide."
(Heinz von Foerster: Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics, 1990-10-04, Système et thérapie familiale, Paris)