ART QUOTES X
quotations about art
Art exists with or without the market; exists without critics or museums. It exists everywhere ... in your backyard. It perseveres because some lucky few are inspired to create in spite of not being supported for their work, not recognized and often taken advantage of by schools and systems that pay lip service, but a minimum of support.
BEN PERRONE
"Freedom to create art is a wonderful thing", Buffalo News, March 22, 2016
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
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
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
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
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
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
In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose--one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.
EDGAR DEGAS
The Shoptalk of Edgar Degas
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 like life should be free, since both are experimental.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and--prayer.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Art is my spiritual path.... Art is my prayer, my ritual, my remembrance of the Divine. Art is the way I knit together the beliefs and practices that guide my life.
PAT B. ALLEN
introduction, Art Is a Spiritual Path
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 is a means to enter, to play with, to dance with, to wrestle with anything that intrigues, delights, disturbs, or terrifies us.
PAT B. ALLEN
introduction, Art Is a Spiritual Path
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
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
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.
ANDRE GIDE
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience--joyous energies;
Humility--yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel--Art.
HERMAN MELVILLE
"Art"