ART QUOTES XV

quotations about art

If they don't know what you're doin'
Babe it must be art.

U2

"Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"

Tags: U2


Art is the signature of man.

G. K. CHESTERTON

The Everlasting Man

Tags: G. K. Chesterton


I'd always thought of art as something that was expressed through certain tools: painting, sculpture, photography, writing, film, music, architecture. And yes, performance. But this performance went beyond performance. This was life.

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

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Computers creating art is an upsetting concept mostly because of what it means about humans.

JASON LEE MILLER

"Automated Content Will Unmake Existence"

Tags: Jason Lee Miller, computers


Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.

ALICE NEEL

"Art Is a Form of History", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings

Tags: freedom


The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.

HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

Journal Intime

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No longer can we consider what the artist does to be a self-contained activity, mysteriously inspired from above, unrelated and unrelatable to other human activities. Instead, we recognize the exalted kind of seeing that leads to the creation of great art as an outgrowth of the humbler and more common activity of the eyes in everyday life. Just as the prosaic search for information is "artistic" because it involves giving and finding shape and meaning, so the artist's conceiving is an instrument of life, a refined way of understanding who and where we are.

RUDOLF ARNHEIM

Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye


Art is man added to Nature.

FRANCIS BACON

Descriptio Globi Intellectus

Tags: Francis Bacon


At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

FERRAN ADRIA

Disegno Daily, Apr. 28, 2014

Tags: Ferran Adria


Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Mystery and Manners

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The work of art is a revelation of the innate goodness of matter. Matter narcissistically mirrors itself in art, with the artist's hidden hand that holds the mirror up, the impersonal mechanism by means of which matter makes its perfection manifest.

DONALD BURTON KUSPIT

Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries


Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds.

PETER ABRAHAMS

End of Story

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Thus, then ... are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation: the medium, the objects, and the manner.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

Tags: art


Art arises in those strange complexities of action that are called human beings. It is a kind of human behavior. As such it is not magic, except as human beings are magical. Nor is it concerned in absolutes, eternities, "forms," beyond those that may reside in the context of the human being and be subject to his vicissitudes. Art is not an inner state of consciousness, whatever that may mean. Neither is it essentially a supreme form of communication. Art is human behavior, and its values are contained in human behavior.

BAKER BROWNELL

Art Is Action

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I don't think there's any more dispiriting sight than a great work of art reduced to a slogan on a mug.

CRAIG BROWN

Daily Telegraph, November 22, 2010