ART QUOTES IV
quotations about art
Art should have political, spiritual, and surprising elements. It should try to find new language of communicating in order to give awareness to the public. Then every society can use the layer it needs at the moment. If one is interested in the political, they can take that. If the next one needs spiritual, it can be found in the same work. So if you just did one level, for example only political, it's like an old newspaper, you read it today and tomorrow it's old news. The art dies. Art with this kind of complexity has many lives where many societies can take something different at different times. It can live for centuries, otherwise who cares?
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
"Marina Abramovic Makes Sundance Shut Up", Interview Magazine
Art knows, life applies knowledge; art feels, life acts.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Art sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
Art is a language that doesn't need to be translated.
AHMAD HARIRI
"How art is helping Syrian refugees keep their culture alive", The Guardian, March 2, 2016
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
JAMES BALDWIN
Esquire, April 1960
Whether it is the beautiful that brings to our hearts the love of truth and justice, or whether it is truth that teaches us how to find the beautiful in nature and how to love it, in either case art does a noble work. It drags out the soul from its everyday shell, and brings it under the spell of its own mysterious and wonderful power, so that a memory of this experience stays with the people, sustains them in their daily labors, and refines their minds.
HELENA MODJESKA
"Women and the Stage", The World's Congress of Representative Women
We live in a world full of urgent problems: climate change, terrorism and poverty, to name but three. We won't resolve them with brawn; they are obstacles we can only overcome by using our brains--when we are thinking like artists and not behaving like animals.
WILL GOMPERTZ
Think Like an Artist: and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
Our mistake has been to categorize things as art by considering certain phases of the process of creation. But logically this can make all man-made objects art. It is more useful to categorize art by what has become its social function. It functions as property.
JOHN BERGER
Selected Essays of John Berger
Never judge a work of art by its defects.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern
Keep doing what you like to do. That's all [art] is.
CORY ARCANGEL
interview with Stina Puotinen, Mar. 21, 2009
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
attributed, Languages of Art
Art ... is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
interview, July 5, 2005
Art -- the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
JAMES THURBER
Collecting Himself
An artist cannot fail; it is success to be one.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Life and the Student
We are all artists. We just have to believe it.
WILL GOMPERTZ
Think Like an Artist: and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, Paper Magazine, September 17, 2014
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason