ART QUOTES XII
quotations about art
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
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
Art achieves all little things by absolute truth: but all her great things need some admixture of illusion.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The swing of art is circular, from form to formalism, from formalism to formlessness, from formlessness to form again.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
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
The shapely female form has no place in Art!
PRINCIPAL SKINNER
The Simpsons
There's no art where there's no fee.
ARISTOPHANES
Plutus
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
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
In every work of art, the artist himself is present.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
Levels
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
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
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
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
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 never expresses anything but itself.
OSCAR WILDE
The Decay of Lying
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
There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH
Blood, Bread and Poetry