ART QUOTES XIV
quotations about art
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
The artist's path sometimes is slippery as well. I just have to stay on it.
KRISHNA MATHIAS
"With preparation, making art is inevitable", Press of Atlantic City, March 8, 2016
The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
WALT WHITMAN
preface, Leaves of Grass
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
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Pleasures of Life
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 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
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
Making art is dealing with people on your own terms. The ideal way of using people is using them like clay, but that being out of the question, except for lunatics and leaders, art is a good alternative.
LUCAS SAMARAS
"Another Autointerview", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
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 two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.
ALICE NEEL
"Art Is a Form of History", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
Art arises in those strange complexities of action that are called human beings. It is a kind of human behavior. As such it is not magic, except as human beings are magical. Nor is it concerned in absolutes, eternities, "forms," beyond those that may reside in the context of the human being and be subject to his vicissitudes. Art is not an inner state of consciousness, whatever that may mean. Neither is it essentially a supreme form of communication. Art is human behavior, and its values are contained in human behavior.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
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
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
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.
TOM ROBBINS
Skinny Legs and All
If you are really creatively engaged with the thing we call ART, it is a 24/7 preoccupation. It can and does seep into all areas of your life.
JAMES GUPPY
"Judging art is a classic business", Echo Netdaily, March 16, 2016
Art is the signature of man.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Everlasting Man
Art is not imitation but illusion.
CHARLES READE
Christie Johnstone
Art is long, and the talk about it is even longer.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes