ART QUOTES XIII
quotations about art
The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
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
Art still has truth. Take refuge there.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Memorial Verses
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
Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history every published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but not recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
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 shapely female form has no place in Art!
PRINCIPAL SKINNER
The Simpsons
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
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
Art is a jealous mistress.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Conduct of Life
Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line.
AMY LOWELL
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry
Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
New York Quarterly, 1985
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
Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Woodburn Harris, February/March 1929
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
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Decay of Lying", The Works of Oscar Wilde
The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land