ART QUOTES X
quotations about art
The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.
C. S. LEWIS
Of This and Other Worlds
Works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
REBECCA WEST
Harriet Hume
To know how to produce a work of art is to know how to discard the extraneous.
LAURA ESQUIVEL
The Law of Love
Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.
EDGAR DEGAS
The Shoptalk of Edgar Degas
Everyone has doors in the living room of their lives that they assume are locked. Doors that lead to artistic expression. People say "I have no talent -- I can't dance or sing or paint or write poetry or play an instrument." More often than not the doors are not locked, just closed. One may turn the handle, open the door and pass through into a larger life space.
ROBERT FULGHUM
self interview, official website
Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
Artistic creativity is a solution--not to the problem of death, or even life--but to the question of "how to live."
JOE FASSLER
"When Art Is an Act of Survival", The Atlantic, March 22, 2016
Science cannot go outside of the sphere of abstractions. In this respect it is infinitely inferior to art, which, in its turn, is peculiarly concerned also with general types and general situations, but which incarnates them by an artifice of its own in forms which, if they are not living in the sense of real life, none the less excite in our imagination the memory and sentiment of life.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and--prayer.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.
MAO ZEDONG
"Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art", May 1942
Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively--because, without this humble appliance, you don't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.
FRANK ZAPPA
The Real Frank Zappa Book
Art is the child of Nature; yes,
Her darling child, in whom we trace
The features of the mother's face,
Her aspect and her attitude,
All her majestic loveliness
Chastened and softened and subdued
Into a more attractive grace,
And with a human sense imbued.
He is the greatest artist, then,
Whether of pencil or of pen,
Who follows Nature.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Keramos
Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it.
FRANK ZAPPA
attributed, Dictionary of Quotations
Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
OSCAR WILDE
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
The artist and the multitude are natural enemies. They always will be, both ways. The artist is an enemy of the multitude, and the multitude is the enemy of the artist. And when the disguise comes off and they're both standing facing one another, they're just there at odds end.
ROBERT ALTMAN
interview with F. Anthony Macklin, 1976