quotations about art
I do get students that initially think they're never going to be that good an artist. I refuse to accept that. There's trained and untrained. It's OK for you to be working on your own level -- as long as you're working.
ROBERT LEMMING
"Art Is Communication: Artist turned teacher encourages conversation", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 11, 2016
The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Death in the Afternoon
Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
JOHN BARTH
attributed, Writers Dreaming
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
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 -- the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
JAMES THURBER
Collecting Himself
Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
It was the job of art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into awareness.
MICHAEL CRICHTON
Next
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"
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".
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Marginalia"
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Art Like Morality Consists in Drawing the Line Somewhere
Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
preface, Salon of 1846
An artist cannot fail; it is success to be one.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Life and the Student
Keep doing what you like to do. That's all [art] is.
CORY ARCANGEL
interview with Stina Puotinen, Mar. 21, 2009
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
JEAN COCTEAU
Newsweek, May 16, 1955
That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.
DANA SPIOTTA
Innocents and Others
Our mistake has been to categorize things as art by considering certain phases of the process of creation. But logically this can make all man-made objects art. It is more useful to categorize art by what has become its social function. It functions as property.
JOHN BERGER
Selected Essays of John Berger
Art is made by the alone for the alone.
LUIS BARRAGÁN
attributed, The Architects' Journal, 1976
The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment