Art Quotes

Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know. A great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplaceor probing authoritatively the unknown.::: Brett Whiteley :::

~ Brett Whiteley

If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.

~ Harmony Korine

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.

~ Witold Gombrowicz

I created an icicle sculpture in the snow. White on white.

~ Mary E. Pearson

The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery.

~ Marie-Antoine Carême

Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.

~ Robert Hughes

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

~ A.s. Byatt

Where utility ends and decoration begins is perfection.

~ Jack Gardner

Thinking is not a thing that can undo itself. It can never be its own solution.

~ Zachary Thomas Dodson

Art serves to confront that which is outside order, to give form to the obscene. In the process, it opens it to transformations that can not only make it safe for public consumption, not a powerful vehicle through which to address the public imagination.

~ Jennifer Birkett

We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

~ Tom Mcdonough

Art is what separates us from the animals.

~ Iimani David

Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love.

~ Louis Faurer

The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.

~ Tacita Dean

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds

~ Ross Wetzsteon

On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfils itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. The creative evolution of his community and his own creative evolution must always be the two earnest purposes of the individual. Its own creative evolution and that of the individuals in its midst must always be the two earnest purposes of the community.

~ Salvador De Madariaga

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely.

~ Lee Siegel

Colour is a matter of personal opinion.

~ Tessa De Loo

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.

~ Peter Weiss

~Dance~My fingers danceOn the set Of ivory & black pirouettes.I let goWhile my fingers fly, Making music through the night.This is the best therapy. A place of release, House of freedom & relief.My oasis of redemption.My river of gentle.My ocean of mental. My mind is relieved. My fingers are free To let go, making music sweet.Rache Nicole Wagner Original

~ Rachel Nicole Wagner

In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing.

~ Stanisław Lem

Early in this century a group of passionate artists in Russia claimed that the essence of art was to make the familiar seem strange. Perhaps this is also one of the roles of the exotic, to alter and sharpen our perceptions.

~ Sueellen Campbell

On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.

~ Alex Shakar

The source of our art then is not in the achievements of other artists in other days and lands, although it has learned a great deal from these, our art is founded on a long and growing love and understanding of the North in an ever clearer experience of oneness with the informing spirit of the whole land and a strange brooding sense of Mother Nature fostering a new race and a new age... So the Canadian artist was drawn North.

~ Lawren Harris

I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others' stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.

~ Henning Mankell

Art cannot save the world, but it does help you understand the world inside of you.

~ Krist Pauwels

Art is long, life is short. Unless your funding is f%$ked, in which case all our days are numbered.

~ Whoopi Goldberg

Art is long, life is short.

~ Whoopi Goldberg

The tragedy of art is the misalignment of merit and the perception thereof. A hype is a classic example of positive (from the creator’s perspective) misalignment. Van Gogh is a classic example of negative misalignment, a poor laggard who may enjoy the fruits of his labour rotting under the ground. Van Gogh went unrecognized, ostracized, and is now celebrated as many who have come before him, and many who will come after him. Therefore, I declare here, the Wisdom of the Crowd does not apply to art.

~ Kevin Focke

It is often said that great works of art are “inexhaustible”—capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of “endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, demonstrates in painful if inadvertently hilarious detail that this does not mean that works of art are immune from - that they are not in fact often subject to—wild and perverse misinterpretation.

~ Roger Kimball

Branding is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is soft.When you brand, rebrand or brand-diggity, ask yourself one thing to do it right: how will my brand create buyers?If you’re in business, that’s the goal. Buyers. Branding done well creates both long term loyalty and timely purchases.

~ Richie Norton

I'm tired of 'pretentious' just being used as an excuse to dismiss anything that fucking expects you to have a brain.

~ T.j. Kirk

The scary part of being an artist is knowing that what makes you a better artist can also kill you.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

The work of art always requires us to adapt to it—and in this manner can be distinguished from escapism or shallow entertainment, which instead aims to adapt to the audience, to give the public exactly what it wants. We can tell that we are encountering a real work of art by the degree to which it resists subjectivity.

~ Ted Gioia

I had come down here, not to serve God as a craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was. They cared not.

~ Rudyard Kipling

The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.

~ Walter Benjamin

Nothing is owed to us in life, not even the innocence of a blue sky. Great art is the art of thankfulness for the abundance of every moment. Writing is a Chinese variant of this thankfulness, a courtesy to life in its cloak of nothing, lined with love.

~ Christian Bobin

I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

If you judge art by its cover, you efface the very essence of it

~ Evy Michaels

It's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it's also true that a word is worth a thousand pictures.

~ Marty Johncox