ART QUOTES VII
quotations about art
The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilization, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for a living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Man and Superman
Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
True art required the right amount of uncertainty, just as gourmet cooking needed the proper spices and flavors.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
Art is one of man's few serious activities.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art begins with resistance -- at the point where resistance is overcome.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
No art is possible without a dance with death.
KURT VONNEGUT
Slaughterhouse-Five
Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Art sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
Art ... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Art Objects
Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Visual Thinking
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter, Feb. 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet
The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.
EDWARD ALBEE
Stretching My Mind
The work of art is a scapegoat surplus product, a dispensable cliche of form and meaning, having only the value the spectator--the symbol of society at large--gives it as he encounters it in the no man's land of the gallery or museum. He victimizes it and is victimized by it; he is ambivalent about it as it is in itself. It has a certain amount of authority, yet no more than he gives it by channeling his life-energy in its forms. In other words, it forces him to recognize his own authoritarian style, i.e., his tendency to treat his own identity as a finished form, but at the same time possessed of an energy that contradicts that form by reaching for other identities. The work of art teaches the spectator that he too is communal cliche and unfinished expression.
DONALD BURTON KUSPIT
Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries
Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Letters to a Young Artist
That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.
OSCAR WILDE
"Art and the Handicraftsman"
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
Don't worry about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.
ANDY WARHOL
attributed, "Andy Warhol's Best Advice about Art", Flavorwire, August 6, 2012