ART QUOTES VI
quotations about art
Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
Killing Yourself to Live
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter, Feb. 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
MICHELLE OBAMA
remarks at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing, May 18, 2009
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On the Level of Desire"
Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
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
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
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
REBECCA WEST
The Strange Necessity
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
REBECCA WEST
The Strange Necessity
Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Art is not Nature, art is Nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
Art ... is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
interview, July 5, 2005
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
NORMAN MAILER
Western Review, winter 1959
I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.
LOUISE NEVELSON
"Dawns and Dusks", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
Realism and art cannot live together.
JENNETTE LEE
The Ibsen Secret