ART QUOTES
quotations about art
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
"Engagement"
Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.
STEPHEN KING
Duma Key
In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.
JOHN BARTH
attributed, Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth
Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.
LEO TOLSTOY
diary
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Paris Review, spring 1956
The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
introduction, Flowering Judas
I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Will to Power
If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Art Objects
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.
PABLO PICASSO
"The Arts: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Covering All Phases of Ancient and Modern Art", 1923
If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.
BERTOLT BRECHT
A Short Organum for the Theatre
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
STELLA ADLER
attributed, The Sound of Applause
When nations grow old, the Arts grow cold,
And Commerce settles on every tree.
WILLIAM BLAKE
On Art and Artists
The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
JAMES JOYCE
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments
It is no wonder if Art frequently prefers Illusion to Truth: for Illusion is her servant, but Truth her mistress.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes