ART QUOTES XIII
quotations about art
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line.
AMY LOWELL
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Antic Hay
It's a great life except for the money. If you are into STUFF, being an artist is probably not your thing unless you can marry yourself off to a financier. But as an artist, you get to do what you love doing and has meaning for you.
JAMES GUPPY
"Judging art is a classic business", Echo Netdaily, March 16, 2016
Art is a jealous mistress.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Conduct of Life
Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Woodburn Harris, February/March 1929
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
Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
TOM STOPPARD
The Invention of Love
Artists need to be realistic as to why they create and whom they are painting for. The one caveat is that you must respect what you do. Potboilers, painted solely for the money, will only get you so far and then the truth will seep out and ... well, it's not a pretty sight.
JAMES GUPPY
"Judging art is a classic business", Echo Netdaily, March 16, 2016
Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Vague Thoughts on Art
Art is what you can get away with.
ANDY WARHOL
attributed, If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend
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
The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Use your sensitive superpowers to create beauty. In a world where rudeness rules it is your art that inspires humanity to tap into kindness and silence.
ESTHER DE CHARON DE SAINT GERMAIN
"Why Art Is Important for Highly Sensitive Persons", Huffington Post, March 15, 2016
That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Truman Capote: Conversations
Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Decay of Lying", The Works of Oscar Wilde
Art is long, and the talk about it is even longer.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
letter to his son John, 1927