ART QUOTES VII
quotations about art
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
W. H. AUDEN
"A Poet of the Actual", Forewords and Afterwords
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Art is one of man's few serious activities.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Strong Opinions
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
REBECCA WEST
The Strange Necessity
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
JEAN COCTEAU
Newsweek, May 16, 1955
The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
WILLIAM JAMES
letter to Henry Rutgers Marshall, Feb. 7, 1899
The work of art is a scapegoat surplus product, a dispensable cliche of form and meaning, having only the value the spectator--the symbol of society at large--gives it as he encounters it in the no man's land of the gallery or museum. He victimizes it and is victimized by it; he is ambivalent about it as it is in itself. It has a certain amount of authority, yet no more than he gives it by channeling his life-energy in its forms. In other words, it forces him to recognize his own authoritarian style, i.e., his tendency to treat his own identity as a finished form, but at the same time possessed of an energy that contradicts that form by reaching for other identities. The work of art teaches the spectator that he too is communal cliche and unfinished expression.
DONALD BURTON KUSPIT
Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries
True art, like nature, ever bears
Suggestions of some higher thing;
As more than form or tint of bird
We prize the song he stops to sing.
EDITH WILLIS LINN FORBES
"A Landscape in Oils"
Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Letters to a Young Artist
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No art is possible without a dance with death.
KURT VONNEGUT
Slaughterhouse-Five
Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated, just as for a mother the cause of sexual conception is love. The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife's love is the birth of a new man into life. The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Visual Thinking
Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.
AMY LOWELL
Tendencies in Modern Poetry
All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.
ROMAN PAYNE
Rooftop Soliloquy
One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Reifications"
Don't worry about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.
ANDY WARHOL
attributed, "Andy Warhol's Best Advice about Art", Flavorwire, August 6, 2012
Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion