Art Quotes

The act of looking appraisingly at a man, studying his body and asking to photograph him, is a brazen venture for a woman; for a male photographer, these acts are commonplace, even expected.

~ Sally Mann

I'm going out on a limb here and say that I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made. ... Oscar Wilde, when attacked in a similar ad hominem way, insisted that it is senseless to speak of morality when discussing art, asserting that the hypocritical, prudish, and philistine English public, when unable to find the art in a work of art, instead looked for the main in it.

~ Sally Mann

We're not copying life, we're making a comment on it.

~ Richard Williams

I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art.

~ Andy Warhol

I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art. The best art are those dime novels. People will put those books in a museum one day. Artists will make paintings of them. They're beautiful. And for everyone. That's how I want my art to be.

~ Andy Warhol

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Pain fuels artistry and creativity. Harness your suffering and become a master of your art.

~ Michelle C. Hillstrom

I may have stumbledand stammered at your unexpected push, but the breezeanchored me and I learnt the art of survival

~ Vijaya Gowrisankar

I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.

~ Sara Baume

If we were in a room full of art, I would stare at her.

~ Kia Amazona

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.

~ Mary Oliver

Creating is like the oxygen in my air.

~ Syd Murray

You know, there used to be a difference between authentic music and sellout music. I'm talking about when I was young, in the sixties? Back then we knew there was a soullessness to the sellouts, and we wanted to be on the side of the artists. But now? Being a sellout is the authentic thing. When Molly Miller says 'I'm just being real,' what she means is that everyone wants money and fame and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. the only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That's the new authenticity. Molly Miler can never be accused of selling out because selling out was her goal all along.

~ Nathan Hill

I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn't matter whether I've seen the artwork for real or not.

~ Sara Baume

How I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it.

~ Sara Baume

Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?

~ Sara Baume

Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the “avant-garde” - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.

~ Mircea Eliade

You can't dance to paintings. This is something Ben said, during one of our White Cube conversations, back when I was still wrong about him. He said it even though, at the time, he was desperately trying to be a painter. He said it because it was true and not because it was something either of us wanted to hear.

~ Sara Baume

Art, and sadness, which last forever.

~ Sara Baume

I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether it's in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans.And those people are artists. They're the ones that sing the truth. And that is something that society has got to protect. But when you enter that field, no matter whether that's Sonia's poetry or Ta-Nehisi's rather startlingly clear prose, it's a dangerous pursuit. Somebody's out to get you. You have to know it before you start, and do it under those circumstances, because it is one of the most important things that human beings do.

~ Toni Morrison

Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures.

~ Oscar Wilde

If we really are saying rap is an art form, then we got to be more responsible for our lyrics. If you see everybody dying because of what you saying, it don’t matter that you didn’t make them die, it just matters that you didn’t save them.

~ Tupac Shakur

Art is the product of an imperfect world. In an ideal world, art would not exist.

~ Marty Rubin

Creative freedom is prosperity for the soul.

~ Michele Jennae

For the first time, we recognized a medium that takes our ordinary, everyday objects like bowls, baskets, and quilts and elevates them to art forms that rival painting and sculpture in their impact.(From the forward to Crafts in America: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects.

~ Jimmy Carter

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.

~ Rebecca West

Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to the whole of that vast and intractable fabric, that sail flapping in the contrary winds of the universe?

~ Rebecca West

Sabism is deabstraction, metacolorism, thematism, exotic, convalescent substrate, soft act, collectivism, pluralization, sensationalism, pluralart, thematic colourism, reabstraction.

~ Lepota L. Cosmo

Sabism is thematic pallet, philosophical colourism, chromatic signature and dual art, bi-chromatic scale, soft scale, poetics of attractiveness, mythologism, actual value, logism of color, active color, logical panel.

~ Lepota L. Cosmo

The sound a box of Lego makes is the noise of a child's mind working, looking for the right piece. Shake it, and it's almost creativity in aural form.

~ Grayson Perry

Art is the product of an imperfect world. In a perfect world, art would not exist.

~ Marty Rubin

An artist's job is to make new clichés.

~ Grayson Perry

It was not my intention - it never was - to invent a character who should speak for me, the author, in person. A character is in a story to fill a role there, and the character's life along with its expression of life is defined by that surrounding - indeed is created by its own story. Yet, it seems to me now, years after I wrote The Golden Apples, that I did bring forth a character with whom I came to feel oddly in touch. She derived from what I already knew for myself, even felt I had always known. What I have put into her is my passion for my own life work, my own art. Exposing yourself to risk is a truth that Mrs. Eckhart and I had in common. What animates and possesses me is what drives Mrs. Eckhart, the love of her art and the love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left. Of course any writer is in part all of his characters. How otherwise would they be known to him, occur to him, become what they are? In the making of her character out of my most inward and most deeply felt self, I would say I have found my voice in my own fiction.

~ Eudora Welty

I am from Lebanon, from Beirut and SaidaI am from the ground underneath my home I am from the trees, the cedar treeI come from Tabouleh and brown eyes, from Karim...Kassar and KassemI come from happiness and cultureFrom Habibi and HayeteI am from all religionsI am from the room beneath the stars.

~ Zeina Kassem

The idea that people can be improved by being offended will finally have to meet the idea (espoused some of the time by some of the same people) that books, popular songs, movies, television shows, sex videos, and so on are just fiction or just art and therefore exist for their own sake and have no influence. To argue that works of art are only fictions or self-expressions and therefore cannot cause bad behavior is to argue also that they cannot cause good behavior. It is, moreover, to make an absolute division between art and life, experience and life, mind and body - a division that is intolerable to anyone who is at all serious about being a human or a member of a community or even a citizen.

~ Wendell Berry

A person does not reach the pinnacle of self-realization without relentlessly exploring the parameters of the self, exhausting their psychic energy coming to know oneself. Without society to rebel against and to sail away from, there would be no advances in civilization; there would be no need for healers and mystics, priests and artist, or shaman and writers. It is our curiosity and refusal to be satisfied with the status quo that compels us to challenge ourselves to learn and continue to grow. We only establish inner peace of mind with acceptance of the world, with the recognition of our connection to the entirety of the universe, and understanding that chaos and change are inevitable. We must also love because without love there are no acts of creation. Without love, humankind is a spasmodic pool of brutality and suffering. Love is a balm. It cures human aches and pains; it unites couples, families, and cultures. Love is a creative force, without love there is no art or religion. Art expresses thought and feelings, an articulation of adore and reverence.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Cheers to all the Rebels out there who care way too much about Art and Truth and Magic to fall in line with the mundane task of fitting in.

~ Scott Stabile

Like God, art seemed to hover over us, perhaps benevolent, and often sublime, but constantly, maddeningly out of reach.

~ Matthew Gallaway

I could only liken it to the strength of a wheat stalk, which when struck by a storm, bends to the ground, but does not break. This stalk of wheat stands tall like a spear in a tempest, clinging to the earth where its roots are embedded deep, embracing the sun from which it draws life.

~ Zeina Kassem

I think, if one is a true art lover, he can't stick to a particular genre. Art knows no partitions, no boundaries.

~ Saketkr