Arts and Artists
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Arts and Artists
Arts and Artists
Adorno, Theodor W.
1903-1969 German Philosopher Sociologist Music Critic
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
Arts and Artists
Alvarez, A.
1929 British Critic Poet Novelist
Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.
Arts and Artists
Anderson, Lindsay
1923 British Film Director
Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.
Arts and Artists
Apollinaire, Guillaume
1880-1918 Italian-born French Poet Critic
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.
Arts and Artists
Apollinaire, Guillaume
1880-1918 Italian-born French Poet Critic
Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother s womb.
Arts and Artists
Arp, Jean
1887-1948 French-German Artist Poet
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
Arts and Artists
Baldwin, James
1924-1987 American Author
Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.
Arts and Artists
Ballard, J. G.
1930 British Author
The first mistake of Art is to assume that it s serious.
Arts and Artists
Bangs, Lester
1948-1982 American Rock Journalist
Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
Arts and Artists
Barenboim, Daniel
1942 Argentinean-born Israeli Pianist Conductor
The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure
Arts and Artists
Baryshnikov, Mikhail
1948 Soviet Dancer Actor
Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.
Arts and Artists
Barzun, Jacques
1907 American Scholar
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
Arts and Artists
Baudelaire, Charles
1821-1867 French Poet
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
Arts and Artists
Baudelaire, Charles
1821-1867 French Poet
As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.
Arts and Artists
Bayley, Stephen
1951 British Design Critic
In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
Arts and Artists
Beauvoir, Simone De
1908-1986 French Novelist Essayist
I m the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don t have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.
Arts and Artists
Beck
1959 American Musician Singer Songwriter
Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?
Arts and Artists
Beethoven, Ludwig Van
1770-1827 German Composer
No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
Arts and Artists
Beethoven, Ludwig Van
1770-1827 German Composer
As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.
Arts and Artists
Bellow, Saul
1915 American Novelist
Any artist should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
Arts and Artists
Bellow, Saul
1915 American Novelist
The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
Arts and Artists
Benjamin, Walter
1982-1940 German Critic Philosopher
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. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
Arts and Artists
Berger, John
1926 British Actor Critic
What is art but a way of seeing?
Arts and Artists
Berger, Thomas
The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.
Arts and Artists
Berle, Adolf
1937-1971 American Politician
The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he s in business.
Arts and Artists
Berryman, John
1914-1972 American Poet
The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
Arts and Artists
Blackie, Professor
The great artist is a slave to his ideals.
Arts and Artists
Bovee, Christian Nevell
1820-1904 American Author Lawyer
Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.
Arts and Artists
Bowen, Elizabeth
1899-1973 Anglo-Irish Novelist
The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.
Arts and Artists
Brancusi, Constantin
1876-1957 Romanian Sculptor
The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
Arts and Artists
Breton, Andre
1989-1966 French Surrealist
What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?
Arts and Artists
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
1806-1861 British Poet
Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature s chief masterpiece is writing well.
Arts and Artists
Buckingham, Duke of
1628-1687 British Poet Satirist Dramatist
In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.
Arts and Artists
Bunuel, Luis
1900-1983 Spanish Film Director
Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don t want it.
Arts and Artists
Burgess, Anthony
1917-1993 British Writer Critic
Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
Arts and Artists
Burroughs, William S.
1914-1997 American Writer
The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.
Arts and Artists
Butler, Samuel
1612-1680 British Poet Satirist
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Arts and Artists
Camus, Albert
1913-1960 French Existential Writer
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
Arts and Artists
Camus, Albert
1913-1960 French Existential Writer
Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Arts and Artists
Capp, Al
1909-1979 American Cartoonist
Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.
Arts and Artists
Carter, Angela
1940-1992 British Author
Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.
Arts and Artists
Cassady, Neal
1926-1968 American Beat Hero
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Arts and Artists
Cather, Willa
1876-1947 American Author
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Arts and Artists
Cather, Willa
1876-1947 American Author
With an apple I will astonish Paris.
Arts and Artists
Cezanne, Paul
1839-1906 French Painter
When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there s a clash between the two, it is bad art.
Arts and Artists
Chagall, Marc
1889-1985 French Artist
When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.
Arts and Artists
Chagall, Marc
1889-1985 French Artist
The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.
Arts and Artists
Chandler, Raymond
1888-1959 American Author
The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
Arts and Artists
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
1874-1936 British Author
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
Arts and Artists
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
1874-1936 British Author
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Arts and Artists
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
1874-1936 British Author
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
Arts and Artists
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
1874-1936 British Author
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
Arts and Artists
Churchill, Winston
1874-1965 British Statesman Prime Minister
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.
Arts and Artists
Ciardi, John
1916-1986 American Teacher Poet Writer
Art is science made clear.
Arts and Artists
Cocteau, Jean
1889-1963 French Author Filmmaker
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
Arts and Artists
Cocteau, Jean
1889-1963 French Author Filmmaker
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
Arts and Artists
Connolly, Cyril
1903-1974 British Critic
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
Arts and Artists
Connolly, Cyril
1903-1974 British Critic
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
Arts and Artists
Conrad, Joseph
1857-1924 Polish-born British Novelist
Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
Arts and Artists
Conrad, Joseph
1857-1924 Polish-born British Novelist
Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.
Arts and Artists
Cushman, Charlotte Saunders
1816-1876 American Actor
Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.
Arts and Artists
Dahlberg, Edward
1900-1977 American Author Critic
There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.
Arts and Artists
Dali, Salvador
1904-1989 Spanish Painter
It is either easy or impossible.
Arts and Artists
Dali, Salvador
1904-1989 Spanish Painter
This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.
Arts and Artists
Dali, Salvador
1904-1989 Spanish Painter
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
Arts and Artists
Davis, Angela Y.
1944 American Political Activist
Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.
Arts and Artists
Debord, Guy
1931 French Philosopher
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
Arts and Artists
Delacroix, Eugene
1798-1863 French Artist
The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don t like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don t like it, you don t understand and you ought to find out.
Arts and Artists
Drummond, John
Art is the most passionate orgy within man s grasp.
Arts and Artists
Dubuffet, Jean
1901-1985 French Sculptor Painter
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.
Arts and Artists
Durrell, Lawrence
1912-1990 British Author
Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?
Arts and Artists
Dworkin, Andrea
1946 American Feminist Critic
The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
Arts and Artists
Eastman, Max
American Commentator Writer
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
Arts and Artists
Eliot, T. S.
1888-1965 American-born British Poet Critic
Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.
Arts and Artists
Eliot, T. S.
1888-1965 American-born British Poet Critic
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
Arts and Artists
Ellis, Havelock
1859-1939 British Psychologist
The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
The true poem is the poet s mind.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
New arts destroy the old.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
Art is the path of the creator to his work.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
Every artist was first an amateur.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
Arts and Artists
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.
Arts and Artists
Farnham, Eliza
American Author and Social Reformist
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn t know why they choose him and he s usually too busy to wonder why.
Arts and Artists
Faulkner, William
1897-1962 American Novelist
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 since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist s way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
Arts and Artists
Faulkner, William
1897-1962 American Novelist
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.
Arts and Artists
Fischer, Ernst
1899-1972 Austrian Editor Poet Critic
I don t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.
Arts and Artists
Fisher, Carrie
1956 American Actress Novelist
Art for art s sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.
Arts and Artists
Forster, Edward M.
1879-1970 British Novelist Essayist
In art as in love, instinct is enough.
Arts and Artists
France, Anatole
1844-1924 French Writer
One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.
Arts and Artists
French, Marilyn
1929 American Author Critic
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Arts and Artists
Frye, Northrop
1912-1991 Canadian Literary Critic
Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.
Arts and Artists
Gasset, Jose Ortega Y
1883-1955 Spanish Essayist Philosopher
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Arts and Artists
Gauguin, Paul
1848-1903 French Artist
The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
Arts and Artists
Geldzahler, Henry
1935 Belgium-born American Curator Art Critic
The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
Arts and Artists
Gide, Andre
1869-1951 French Author
Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.
Arts and Artists
Gill, Eric
1882-1940 British Sculptor Engraver Writer Typographer
Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
Arts and Artists
Ginsberg, Allen
1926 American Poet
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Arts and Artists
Godard, Jean-Luc
1930 French Filmmaker Author
The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.
Arts and Artists
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
1749-1832 German Poet Dramatist Novelist
The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.
Arts and Artists
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
1749-1832 German Poet Dramatist Novelist
Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Arts and Artists
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
1749-1832 German Poet Dramatist Novelist
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
Arts and Artists
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
1749-1832 German Poet Dramatist Novelist
Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
Arts and Artists
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
1749-1832 German Poet Dramatist Novelist
I can t work without a model. I won t say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.
Arts and Artists
Gogh, Vincent Van
1853-1890 Dutch Painter
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
Arts and Artists
Gogh, Vincent Van
1853-1890 Dutch Painter
As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.
Arts and Artists
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De
1822-1896 French Writers
A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.
Arts and Artists
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De
1822-1896 French Writers
Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
Arts and Artists
Gordimer, Nadine
1923 South African Author
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that s hard for a puritan to understand.
Arts and Artists
Grass, Gunther
1927 German Author
There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.
Arts and Artists
Havel, Vaclav
1936 Czech Playwright President
Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.
Arts and Artists
Haydon, Benjamin
1786-1846 British Artist
If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He s not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he s really needed.
Arts and Artists
Hockney, David
1937 British Artist
A picture is a poem without words.
Arts and Artists
Horace
BC 65-8 Italian Poet
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
Arts and Artists
Huxley, Aldous
1894-1963 British Author
A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
Arts and Artists
Ionesco, Eugene
1912 Romanian-born French Playwright
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you re an artist.
Arts and Artists
Jacob, Max
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
Arts and Artists
James, Henry
1843-1916 American Author
Art has an enemy called ignorance.
Arts and Artists
Johnson, Ben
1600-British Clergyman Poet
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
Arts and Artists
Johnson, Samuel
1709-1784 British Author
I m still an artist. I m never gonna do a shit movie, because I ve got my modeling to support me.
Arts and Artists
Jovovich, Milla
1975 Soviet-born Actress Model Singer Songwriter
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
Arts and Artists
Joyce, James
1882-1941 Irish Author
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
Arts and Artists
Kael, Pauline
1919 American Film Critic
I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
Arts and Artists
Kennedy, John F.
1917-1963 Thirty-fifth President of the USA
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
Arts and Artists
Kennedy, John F.
1917-1963 Thirty-fifth President of the USA
In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.
Arts and Artists
Kennedy, John F.
1917-1963 Thirty-fifth President of the USA
Art, that great undogmatized church.
Arts and Artists
Key, Ellen
1849-1926 Swedish Author Feminist
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves It s pretty, but is it Art?
Arts and Artists
Kipling, Rudyard
1865-1936 British Author of Prose Verse
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
Arts and Artists
Klee, Paul
1879-1940 Swiss Artist
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Arts and Artists
Klee, Paul
1879-1940 Swiss Artist
An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
Arts and Artists
Kooning, Willem De
1904 Dutch-born American Artist
In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.
Arts and Artists
Kooning, Willem De
1904 Dutch-born American Artist
Whatever an artist s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.
Arts and Artists
Kooning, Willem De
1904 Dutch-born American Artist
The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.
Arts and Artists
Kramer, Hilton
In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.
Arts and Artists
Kronenberger, Louis
Art is the objectification of feeling.
Arts and Artists
Langer, Suzanne K.
1895-1985 American Philosopher
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.
Arts and Artists
Lao-Tzu
BC 600 Chinese Philosopher Founder of Taoism Author of the Tao Te Ching
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
Arts and Artists
Lewis, Sinclair
1885-1951 First American Novelist to win the Nobel Prize for literature
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can t force it.
Arts and Artists
Lewitzky, Bella
1916 American Dancer
Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.
Arts and Artists
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
1819-1892 American Poet
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.
Arts and Artists
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
1819-1892 American Poet
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
Arts and Artists
Mailer, Norman
1923 American Author
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
Arts and Artists
Matisse, Henri
1869-1954 French Artist
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Arts and Artists
Mcluhan, Marshall
1911-1980 Canadian Communications Theorist
Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.
Arts and Artists
Mcluhan, Marshall
1911-1980 Canadian Communications Theorist
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
Arts and Artists
Mcluhan, Marshall
1911-1980 Canadian Communications Theorist
Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Arts and Artists
Menzies, Robert
1894-1978 Australian Liberal Politician Prime Minister
Caricature is rough truth.
Arts and Artists
Meredith, George
1828-1909 British Author
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
Arts and Artists
Michelangelo
1474-1564 Italian Renaissance Painter Sculptor
The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.
Arts and Artists
Miller, Henry
1891-1980 American Author
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
Arts and Artists
Miller, Henry
1891-1980 American Author
Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
Arts and Artists
Miller, Henry
1891-1980 American Author
Art is man s expression of his joy in labor.
Arts and Artists
Morris, William
1834-1896 British Artist Writer Printer
If I didn t start painting, I would have raised chickens.
Arts and Artists
Moses, Grandma
1860-1961 American Artist
The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
Arts and Artists
Motherwell, Robert
1915-1991 American Artist
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Arts and Artists
Murdoch, Iris
1919 British Novelist Philosopher
To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.
Arts and Artists
Nathan, George Jean
1882-1958 American Critic
Art raises its head where creeds relax.
Arts and Artists
Nietzsche, Friedrich
1844-1900 German Philosopher
Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
Arts and Artists
Nietzsche, Friedrich
1844-1900 German Philosopher
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Arts and Artists
Nietzsche, Friedrich
1844-1900 German Philosopher
The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.
Arts and Artists
Novalis
1772-1801 German Poet Novelist
Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.
Arts and Artists
Novalis
1772-1801 German Poet Novelist
There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.
Arts and Artists
Paglia, Camille
1947 American Author Critic Educator
Art is a form of catharsis.
Arts and Artists
Parker, Dorothy
1893-1967 American Humorous Writer
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
Arts and Artists
Paz, Octavio
1914 Mexican Poet Essayist
Wherever art appears, life disappears.
Arts and Artists
Picabia, Francis
1878-1953 French Painter Poet
Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
Arts and Artists
Picasso, Pablo
1881-1973 Spanish Artist
The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.
Arts and Artists
Picasso, Pablo
1881-1973 Spanish Artist
Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.
Arts and Artists
Picasso, Pablo
1881-1973 Spanish Artist
If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.
Arts and Artists
Picasso, Pablo
1881-1973 Spanish Artist
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Arts and Artists
Picasso, Pablo
1881-1973 Spanish Artist
Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
Arts and Artists
Picasso, Pablo
1881-1973 Spanish Artist
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
Arts and Artists
Picasso, Pablo
1881-1973 Spanish Artist
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.
Arts and Artists
Poe, Edgar Allan
1809-1845 American Poet Critic short-story Writer
The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.
Arts and Artists
Pope, Alexander
1688-1744 British Poet Critic Translator
But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
Arts and Artists
Pound, Ezra
1885-1972 American Poet Critic
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
Arts and Artists
Pound, Ezra
1885-1972 American Poet Critic
Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
Arts and Artists
Pound, Ezra
1885-1972 American Poet Critic
A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
Arts and Artists
Proust, Marcel
1871-1922 French Novelist
The perfection of art is to conceal art.
Arts and Artists
Quinet, Edgar
1803-1875 French Poet Historian Politician
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist s metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man s nature.
Arts and Artists
Rand, Ayn
1905-1982 Russian Writer Philosopher
Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
Arts and Artists
Reinhardt, Ad
1913-1967 American Artist
He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]
Arts and Artists
Renoir, Pierre Auguste
1841-1919 French Impressionist Artist
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.
Arts and Artists
Rich, Adrienne
1929 American Poet
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
Arts and Artists
Riding, Laura
1901-1991 American Poet
Surely all art is the result of one s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.
Arts and Artists
Rilke, Rainer Maria
1875-1926 German Poet
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don t need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]
Arts and Artists
Rodin, Auguste
1840-1917 French Sculptor
What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?
Arts and Artists
Rosenberg, Harold
1906-1978 American Art Critic Author
Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.
Arts and Artists
Rosenberg, Harold
1906-1978 American Art Critic Author
Inside you there s an artist you don t know about. He s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.
Arts and Artists
Rumi, Jalal-Uddin
1207-1273 Persian Sufi Mystic Poet
Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Arts and Artists
Rushdie, Salman
1948 Indian-born British Author
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
Arts and Artists
Ruskin, John
1819-1900 British Critic Social Theorist
I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public s face.
Arts and Artists
Ruskin, John
1819-1900 British Critic Social Theorist
No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.
Arts and Artists
Ruskin, John
1819-1900 British Critic Social Theorist
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
Arts and Artists
Sand, George
1804-1876 French Novelist
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
Arts and Artists
Santayana, George
1863-1952 American Philosopher Poet
The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.
Arts and Artists
Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von
1759-1805 German Dramatist Poet Historian
As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.
Arts and Artists
Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von
1759-1805 German Dramatist Poet Historian
Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.
Arts and Artists
Schumann, Robert
1810-1856 German Composer
The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.
Arts and Artists
Schumann, Robert
1810-1856 German Composer
All art is an imitation of nature.
Arts and Artists
Seneca
4 BC – 65 AD Spanish-born Roman Statesman philosopher
The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]
Arts and Artists
Shakespeare, William
1564-1616 British Poet Playwright Actor
O, had I but followed the arts!
Arts and Artists
Shakespeare, William
1564-1616 British Poet Playwright Actor
Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
Arts and Artists
Shaw, George Bernard
1856-1950 Irish-born British Dramatist
Art is the signature of civilizations.
Arts and Artists
Sills, Beverly
American Opera Singer
The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
Arts and Artists
Smith, Logan Pearsall
1865-1946 Anglo-American Essayist Aphorist
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
Arts and Artists
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
1918 Russian Novelist
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
Arts and Artists
Sontag, Susan
1933 American Essayist
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.
Arts and Artists
Stein, Gertrude
1874-1946 American Author
What is Art? It is the response of man s creative soul to the call of the Real.
Arts and Artists
Tagore, Rabindranath
1861-1941 Indian Poet Philosopher
Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
Arts and Artists
Thurber, James
1894-1961 American Humorist Illustrator
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can t eat it.
Arts and Artists
Tolstoy, Count Leo
1828-1910 Russian Novelist Philosopher
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
Arts and Artists
Trilling, Lionel
1905-1975 American Critic
All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.
Arts and Artists
Trocchi, Alexander
1925-1983 Italian-Scottish Novelist Poet Translator
If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.
Arts and Artists
Trotsky, Leon
1879-1940 Russian Revolutionary
If that s art, I m a Hottentot!
Arts and Artists
Truman, Harry S.
1884-1972 Thirty-third President of the USA
Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.
Arts and Artists
Tynan, Kenneth
1927-1980 British Critic
Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.
Arts and Artists
Tzara, Tristan
1896-1963 Rumanian-born French Dadaist
Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.
Arts and Artists
Unknown, Source
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
Arts and Artists
Unknown, Source
Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There s a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art
Arts and Artists
Unknown, Source
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it s a painting, and if you can walk around it it s a sculpture.
Arts and Artists
Unknown, Source
Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.
Arts and Artists
Unknown, Source
Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.
Arts and Artists
Updike, John
1932 American Novelist Critic
Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.
Arts and Artists
Varese, Edward
The art of creation is older than the art of killing.
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