Best 22487 quotes in «art quotes» category

I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.

I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea

I really don't like art with a message, unless the message is crystal clear. If you have a message that really needs to be said, just fuckin' say it! Don't hide it in indecipherable lyrics... a sculpture, it's a play, the subtext... just fuckin' say it, 'cause the people who need to hear messages are dumb as shit--the masses of humanity are dumb as shit, and you're really just pandering to your friends. Say what the fuck you mean, just say it! Title the song 'eat more leafy greens'. 'Give a hoot, don't pollute' is as much message and art combined, 'cause I get that, it's a poem but I'm pretty sure you're saying 'don't pollute'. But if you have something... 'ooh, I have the cure for cancer...and I've hidden it in this Rubix cube!!' -- just fuckin' say it! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]

I really believe that there is an invisible red thread tied between him and me, and that it has stretched and tangled for years — across oceans and lifetimes. I know that it won’t break because our souls are tied.

I refused, and still refuse, the inflated definition of artists as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses.

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely.

I romanticize life the way artists see scenery or a dreamer gazes up at the stars.

I ruin everything. I think that a bullet must have passed through my heart when I was very young, causing me to bleed out slowly, over things and people and every white surface that I’d ever come across.

I saw all my colors, I realized that painting has the same power as music.

I saw a painting once where the artist had actually done that--signed his work in blood. ... When I saw that, I thought it was as if the man who had painted the picture wanted to say to me, Well, you did ask what this actually cost.

I saw that something remained of the fools' play, the death dance of human life, something lasting: works of art. They too will probably perish some day; they'll burn or crumble or be destroyed. Still, they outlast many human lives; they form a silent empire of images and relics beyond the fleeting moment. To work at that seems good and comforting to me, because it almost succeeds in making the transitory eternal.

I sat there and my love to him poured out more and more, and, lo, he flew down to a stump, and then to my knee. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the important thing is the love that goes out from oneself.

I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times they had called it sprezzatura. The idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one’s every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat.

I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art. The best art are those dime novels. People will put those books in a museum one day. Artists will make paintings of them. They're beautiful. And for everyone. That's how I want my art to be.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

I see a sacred beautiful art.

I see no reason to consider an artist's work any more valuable or important than any other kind of work.

I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art.

I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw everything, why draw anything?

I set about seeking a thread, a theme, a style, in the realm of legend. Something that might allow me to give free rein to my juvenile sense of romanticism and the beautiful image.

ISIS and these kinds of extremists are a death cult. We’re a life cult. Rock ’n’ roll is a life force, and it’s joy as an act of defiance.

I should’ve probably warned you: once you end a relationship with an artist, you are perpetually reminded of them. They have now ruined classical music and jazz for you. They have ruined books and poetry. You should just forget about galleries and museums. But you know what the worst part is? It’s how they witnessed and observed you, making you feel like the only person in the room. And you secretly loved being looked at, being worshipped. So now you avoid mirrors. Because when you look at yourself, you remember me.

...I sit and gaze like this for a long time, recovering through art from the effort of creating it.

Is it not funny, in the presence of an unlimited God, we will still be stucked? Sometimes faith overwrites the fact, that some people have not come to realise. Stop giving excuses and telling God what is happening around you. You have the tools.

I should still, paradoxical as it may sound, like to maintain the opposite valuation of the dream in relation to the mysterious foundation of our being, whose phenomena we are. The more aware I become of these omnipotent art impulses in nature, and find in them an ardent longing for illusion and for redemption by illusion, the more I feel compelled to make the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent, the primal Oneness, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the delightful vision, the pleasurable illusion for its constant redemption: an illusion that we, utterly caught up in it and consisting of it—as a continuous becoming in time, space and causality, in other words—are required to see as empirical reality.

Isn't the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? What hooks me on our story is our different readings of it. You think it's personal and private; my neurosis... I think our story is performative philosophy.

I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.

I spent the two and one-half months between my meeting with the Art Commission and the beginning of my actual mural work in soaking up impressions of the productive activities of the city. I studied industrial scenes by night as well as by day, making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms; also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate; and of the men who worked them all. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. I was afire with enthusiasm. My childhood passion for mechanical toys had been transmuted to a delight in machinery for its own sake and for its meaning to man -- his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty. That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun. This was the "philosophy," the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.

Is there a recipe for making beauty? The schools give recipes, but they do not beget works that make people exclaim: " How beautiful that is!

… I studied the painting that hangs over the small fireplace. Immerse myself in art, I told myself. Immerse myself in the conversation of those strollers, people who seem to move about more comfortably in their early-evening twilight than I do, people of maybe sixty years ago.

I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it.

I still see flaws in my work, everywhere I look. It's exhausting and mortifying and almost unbearable.

I suspect, in fact, that a good deal of the value of an interpretation is -- that it should be my own interpretation.

I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretense that things are real, due to one's longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the Vicar said about religion being an extension of art - and then I had a glimpse of how religion can really cure you of sorrow; somehow make use of it, turn it to beauty, just as art can make sad things beautiful. I found myself saying: 'Sacrifice is the secret - you have to sacrifice things for art and it's the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.' Then I got confused and I couldn't hold on to what I meant - until Miss Blossom remarked: 'Nonsense, duckie - it's prefectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it's a lovely rest.' I saw that, all right. Then I thought: 'But that's how Miss Marcy cured her sorrow, too - only she lost herself in other people instead of in religion.' Which way of life was best - hers or the Vicar's? I decided that he loves God and merely likes the villagers, whereas she loves the villagers and merely likes God - and then I suddenly wondered if I could combine both ways, love God and my neighbor equally. Was I really willing to?

I suppose I think we need God for the same reason we need art.’ ‘Because it’s nice to look at?’ ‘No.’ Mira smiled. ‘Because it shows us what’s possible.

It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.

I take in all the colorful locks that line the bridge. Each one told a story. Each lock represented a relationship that was once special, whether it ended or turned into true happiness. The locks represented a past, present, and a possible future.

It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.

It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.

It does not matter where one comes from, one can achieve even the greatest of things in life.

It does not matter whether you get the appreciation that you deserve. It does not matter whether your art gets the appreciation that it deserves. A true artist does not ever stop creating art!

- It doesn't do anything obvious. But it might be able to do something in here. - Then she touched her hand to her heart. - Beautiful things sometimes do.

It follows from Schopenhauer’s analysis that evert genuine work of art must have its origin in direct perception; that is to say it does not originate in concepts, and concepts are not what it communicates. This is what more than anything else differentiates good art from bad, or more accurately authentic from inauthentic art. The latter often originates in a desire on the part of the artist to meet some demand external to himself – to win approval, say, or be in the fashion, or supply a market – or else to put over a message of some sort. Such an artist starts by trying to thin what it would be a good idea to do – in other words, the starting point of the process for him is something that exists in terms of concepts. The inevitable result is dead art, of whatever kind, whether imitative, academic, commercial, didactic or fashion-conscious. It may be successful in its day because it meets the demands of its day, but once that day is over it has no inner life of its own with which to outlive it.

I tell everybody to practice some art, no matter how badly or how well. It doesn’t matter. It’s the experience of becoming—of creating—that truly matters. It is as important as sex or food. It’s a tragedy to me that our schools have cut art out of the curriculum, because (they say) it’s not a way to make a living. Well, it’s not a way to make a living; it’s a way to become, to find out what you are, what you can do, what’s inside of you.

I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.

It has been said that art is a tryst; for in the joy of it, maker and beholder meet.

I think a lot of modern art is complete bullshit. But I admire the creativity. The weird shit people think of! Some of the most interesting things I've ever seen in my life, I've seen in modern art museums. And that's what art is all about. It's supposed to make you think.

IThe epiphany in this thought is that we simply cannot and do not create in isolation. As I paint my blank canvas others leave their mark on my masterpiece. Many have added colors and textures I knew not existed, greatly improving my creation..and yet...and yet... There are those who have punctured the fine leather and scraped at the rainbows of my mind ... creating stormy patches where there were once colors beaming from the page.