ART QUOTES XIV
quotations about art
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
Art is not imitation but illusion.
CHARLES READE
Christie Johnstone
Art is a jealous mistress.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Conduct of Life
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
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
YANN MARTEL
Life of Pi
There's no art where there's no fee.
ARISTOPHANES
Plutus
Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"My Bill of Rights", The Diabolical Principle
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Economist, Sep. 15, 2010
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
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
How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for.
JULIAN BARNES
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
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
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
Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
New York Quarterly, 1985
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
The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form -- to make it true and real to the theme, not to life.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"A Note on Realism", The Literary Review, Oct. 25, 1924
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
MAXIM GORKY
Untimely Thoughts
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.
NADINE GORDIMER
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1991