Art Quotes

It’s television, after all. No one is dead, even when they die.

~ Chris Campanioni

Whether you love Bach or would rather listen to a composition produced by Kulitta Software, Bach has and will continue to demand the we approach and answer the question, 'what is the art, science and language of music?

~ Anastasia Lily

The future is trash. Recycling it, re-arranging it. Making it beautiful again.

~ Chris Campanioni

I have heard of you- a kind of revolutionary. Hard to be a revolutionary in the deadly museum business.

~ Thomas Hoving

… I studied the painting that hangs over the small fireplace. Immerse myself in art, I told myself. Immerse myself in the conversation of those strollers, people who seem to move about more comfortably in their early-evening twilight than I do, people of maybe sixty years ago.

~ Diane B. Saxton

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

~ Patti Smith

I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.

~ Patti Smith

New artists have been obtained. These do not object to, and indeed argue enthusiastically for, the rationalization process. Production is up. Quality-control devices have been installed at those points where the interests of artists and audiences intersect. Shipping and distribution have been improved out of all recognition. (It is in this area, they say in Paraguay, that traditional practices were most blameworthy.) The rationalized art is dispatched from central art dumps to regional art dumps, and from there into the lifestreams of cities. Each citizen is given as much art as his system can tolerate.

~ Donald Barthelme

Art lovers ought to be crazy.That's how they see the fun side of everything.

~ Saru Singhal

I don't want realism. I want magic. I live magic. I am magic.

~ Oksana Rus

To become a work of art is the object of living.

~ Oscar Wilde

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working.

~ Henri Matisse

If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.

~ Oscar Wilde

No art is silent! Because art is an original idea and every original idea speaks, every interesting thought screams, every art talks, every art screams! No art is silent! If it is silent, then it is not an art!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The world concerns me only in so far as I owe it a certain debt and duty, so to speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings—not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.

~ E.m. Forster

Maybe stories choose how they are told and who tells them.

~ Kamand Kojouri

When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

~ Valentina Knurova

Nothing seems to me more tragic than the pressures we put on artists to do what we think we'll like, and our refusal to prize what is most ornery and special about them.

~ Marcia B. Siegel

OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.

~ Nick Flynn

Everything is art and it's part of the painting. (To talk with somebody it's art, to understand a language is art, to understand a book is art, to understand somebody is art...)

~ Deyth Banger

I assert that the art of sculpture, among all the arts connected with design, is at least seven times greater than any other, for the following reason: why, sir, a statue of true sculpture ought to have seven points of view, which ought all to boast equal excellence.

~ Benvenuto Cellini

My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures—it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered—how was it for you to read it? Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience.

~ Nick Flynn

Art might be beautiful even though the artist is not.

~ Debasish Mridha

Art is neither a muscle nor a cure for ugliness. Ugliness has its own reasons and convictions to stay here. Art has a patience of a civilized, patience to withhold the gentleness of the civilization.

~ Ashutosh Gupta

You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.

~ Henning Mankell

The greatest masters have only made single statues, groups are always inferior; that is why Carpeaux, big though he was, is less so than Rodin, for he never knew how to make single statues. He did not know how to find his rhythm in the arrangement of the shapes of one body, but obtained it by the disposition of several. The great sculptors are there to prove it. Think of the masterpieces which we like most, all standing or seated, and one at a time, and they are not in the least monotonous. The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure.

~ H.s. Ede

A great artist is conscious of the talent and the power he possesses, otherwise he would not see his faults, and so would not be able to improve.

~ H.s. Ede

We are all of lifewho stepped from the seatrading weightless journeys of the currentsWe are all of lifewho build and tear down and build againto find gold and silverto find scars that weep and bleedto step from the seato stay with the sea

~ Tamara Rendell

There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.

~ Andrew Solomon

Your art…” I gaped at the field of white. “There was a lovely portrait of me—right there.”I get offended whenever art is damaged, especially if that art features me.

~ Rick Riordan

Sometimes it seems like pain is too obvious a place to turn for inspiration. Pain isn't always deep, anyway. Sometimes it's awful and that's it. Or boring. Surely other things can be as profound as pain.

~ Ellen Forney

The only road to freedom is self-education in art. Art is not a luxury for any advancedcivilization; it is a necessity, without which creative intelligence will wither and die. Evenin economically troubled times, support for the arts should be a national imperative.Dance, for example, requires funding not only to secure safe, roomy rehearsal space butto preserve the indispensible continuity of the teacher-student link. American culture hasbecome unbalanced by its obsession with the blood sport of politics, a voracious vortexconsuming everything in its path. History shows that, for both individuals and nations,political power is transient. America's true legacy is its ideal of liberty, which has inspiredinsurgencies around the world. Politicians and partisans of both the Right and the Leftmust recognize that art too is a voice of liberty, requiring nurture without intrusion. Artunites the spiritual and material realms. In an age of alluring, magical machines, thesociety that forgets art risks losing its soul.

~ Camille Paglia

Making a whole is very important. Most people paint things and forget the whole.

~ Tove Jansson

[David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.

~ Janet Malcolm

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

An artist is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone.

~ Neel Burton

It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude.

~ Guy De Maupassant

Most humans, it seems, still put up fences around their acts and thoughts – even when these are piles of shit – for they have no other way of delimiting them. Contrast Paleolithic cave paintings, in which animals and magical markings are overlayed with no differentiation or sense of framing. But when some of us have worked in natural settings, say in a meadow, woods, or mountain range, our cultural training has been so deeply ingrained that we have simply carried a mental rectangle with us to drop around whatever we were doing. This made us feel at home. (Even aerial navigation is plotted geometrically, thus giving the air a shape.)

~ Allan Kaprow

What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself — a voice answering a voice.

~ Virginia Woolf