"Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue"
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Breton’s line lands like a compliment delivered with a switchblade. To call Dali “like a man who hesitates between talent and genius” sounds generous until you feel the trap: hesitation is the indictment. Genius, in the Surrealist universe Breton tried to police, isn’t merely ability; it’s total commitment to a program of psychic risk, collective discipline, and scandal aimed at bourgeois reality. “Talent” is what the art world rewards. “Genius” is what the movement demands. Dali, to Breton, hovers opportunistically at the threshold, exploiting Surrealism’s electricity without submitting to its ethics.
The kicker is the second clause, “between vice and virtue,” which smuggles in an older moral vocabulary to sharpen the judgment. Breton pretends to “once have said” it that way, as if this is a quaint formulation from a previous century, but he deploys it precisely because it exposes the fight underneath: Dali’s aesthetic choices are inseparable from character and politics. The remark comes from a moment when Surrealism was fracturing, and Breton was the movement’s self-appointed gatekeeper, increasingly intolerant of artists who turned the avant-garde into personal brand. Dali’s theatricality, appetite for fame, and later flirtations with reactionary imagery made him the perfect target.
So the sentence performs what it describes: it hesitates between praise and condemnation, then chooses condemnation while keeping plausible deniability. Breton’s wit works because it frames Dali’s ambiguity as a moral failure, not a complexity - a way of saying the real sin isn’t vice, it’s calculation.
The kicker is the second clause, “between vice and virtue,” which smuggles in an older moral vocabulary to sharpen the judgment. Breton pretends to “once have said” it that way, as if this is a quaint formulation from a previous century, but he deploys it precisely because it exposes the fight underneath: Dali’s aesthetic choices are inseparable from character and politics. The remark comes from a moment when Surrealism was fracturing, and Breton was the movement’s self-appointed gatekeeper, increasingly intolerant of artists who turned the avant-garde into personal brand. Dali’s theatricality, appetite for fame, and later flirtations with reactionary imagery made him the perfect target.
So the sentence performs what it describes: it hesitates between praise and condemnation, then chooses condemnation while keeping plausible deniability. Breton’s wit works because it frames Dali’s ambiguity as a moral failure, not a complexity - a way of saying the real sin isn’t vice, it’s calculation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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