ART QUOTES XII
quotations about art
How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for.
JULIAN BARNES
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
In every work of art, the artist himself is present.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
Levels
There's no art where there's no fee.
ARISTOPHANES
Plutus
Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Back to Methuselah
The only original part in a work of art is the infusion of the artist's own character, if he has one.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair ... pick another profession.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Letters to a Young Artist
Art achieves all little things by absolute truth: but all her great things need some admixture of illusion.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
They say that art should stand the test of time. Life lasts a limited amount of time. Mountains and trees and earth will outlive human beings, but we don't know if they will be here always. Art does outlast the life span of its maker. Art should communicate to an increasing circle of strangers--people who do now know the artist, but come to know the work, and through the work, come to know something about the humanity of the artist that rings with their own humanity.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Letters to a Young Artist
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
YANN MARTEL
Life of Pi
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
speech to Royal Academy of Art, 1953
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Art is what you can get away with.
ANDY WARHOL
attributed, If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
The scope of art is practically boundless; it does not begin and end with the painting of pictures and the modeling of statues; where there is room for workmanship there is room for it.
LEWIS FOREMAN DAY
Everyday Art
The shapely female form has no place in Art!
PRINCIPAL SKINNER
The Simpsons
There is no surer way of evading the world than by Art; and no surer way of uniting with it than by Art.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Economist, Sep. 15, 2010
I'm very picky when it comes to the art I like. What most people would consider to be a genius piece of work, I look at and feel absolutely nothing. I can appreciate and be impressed by the work that goes into creating something like a sculpture or a painting but if it doesn't "speak" to me then I'm simply not going to have some kind of emotional reaction.
JONATHAN BARKAN
"This Art is as Mysterious and Beautiful as it is Macabre", Bloody Disgusting, March 18, 2016
It's a great life except for the money. If you are into STUFF, being an artist is probably not your thing unless you can marry yourself off to a financier. But as an artist, you get to do what you love doing and has meaning for you.
JAMES GUPPY
"Judging art is a classic business", Echo Netdaily, March 16, 2016