Best 22487 quotes in «art quotes» category

The god of art neither has religion nor gender or color or any shape. All he does is sit inside me and smile every time I look inside myself and ask him a question. A smile that resembles a silver lining on the darkest cloud. A smile that cuts me off from my reality and throws me into infinity and beyond. At that moment, all I can feel is floating in a place that doesn't have gravity and looking at the memories of the people who have asked him the same questions before.

The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.

The greater puzzle of universal wisdom and beauty that we have strived to honor through our work includes the profound legacies of world artistic and spiritual traditions, the innate integrity of human communities where people seek to live in social harmony, and that regenerative stream of life sustained upon the earth itself as it spins through the cosmos to the music of the spheres.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." [Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]

The greatest artist does not have any concept Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain Within its excess, though only A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.

The great artistic figure of the nineteenth century, who impressed himself deeply upon the imagination of Europe, was Beethoven. Beethoven is visualised as a man in a garret, poor, unkempt, neglected, rough, ugly; he has thrown away the world, he will have none of its wealth, and although the rewards are offered, he rejects them. He rejects them in order to fulfill himself, in order to serve the inner vision, in order to express that which demands, with an absolute imperative force, that it be expressed. The worst thing that a man can do is to 'sell out', to betray an ideal. That alone is despicable - despicable because the only thing which makes values values, which makes some things right and others wrong, the only thing which can justify conduct, is this inner vision.

The greatest artists express their inner self; an artist paints her rage; a writer pens his fear; a dancer expresses her sadness through movement; and a musician's loneliness echoes in his performance.

The greatest events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow out in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.

The greatest masters have only made single statues, groups are always inferior; that is why Carpeaux, big though he was, is less so than Rodin, for he never knew how to make single statues. He did not know how to find his rhythm in the arrangement of the shapes of one body, but obtained it by the disposition of several. The great sculptors are there to prove it. Think of the masterpieces which we like most, all standing or seated, and one at a time, and they are not in the least monotonous. The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure.

The great majority of Castalians, the officials no less than the scholars and students, lived in their Pedagogic Province and their Order as if these constituted a stable, eternal, inevitable world. They knew, of course, that it had not always existed, that it had come into being slowly and amid bitter struggles in times of cruel distress; they knew it had originated at the end of the Age of Wars out of a double source: the heroically ascetic efforts of scholars, artists, and thinkers who had come to their senses, and the profound craving of the exhausted, bled, and betrayed peoples for order, normality, reason, lawfulness, and moderation.

The great thing about art is that anyone can do it.

The guitarist is dependent on the guitar, which is dependent upon the creation, which is dependent on whatever creative forces or realities are responsible for its existence. If you call this creative force or reality "God," then art really could be thought of as the language God speaks. All art is rooted in whatever is the foundation of everything.

The harder you work, the more you produce, the more you create, the more you will be rejected. By people who never created shit.

The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. This hatred would involve the hatred of the arts.

The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.

The heart of a man is a small thing but it desires great matters. It is not big enough for a dog’s dinner but the whole world is not big enough for it. Man spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. From the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound; from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child.(...)And who will exterminate him who exterminates all others?

The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.

The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.

The hours tick by as I lie in bed. Memories keep surfacing, tormenting me into unbelievable sadness. I can't bring myself to move. I can't fight the memories that keep filling my thoughts. I stay curled in the fetal position as each memory plays out. I can't stop them from coming. I can't make them go away. Nothing can distract me. I can't block the memories, so they continue to come.

The hunger that gives rise to art must be greater than what art can satisfy.

The idea that any art is achieved 'intuitively' is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artist as subhuman. It is those supposed incapable of intelligence, training, or connection with a tradition who are described as working by instinct or intuition.

The idea of attention or contemplation, of looking carefully at something and holding it before the mind, may be conveyed early on in childhood. 'Look, listen, isn't that nice?' Also, 'Don't touch!' This is moral training as well as preparation for a pleasurable life. It need not depend on words, but can also be learnt from patterns of behaviour which should in any case back up the words. The far reaching idea of respect is included in such teaching. The, as it might seem, sophisticated concept of a work of art may be acquired easily. Children, if they are lucky, are invited to attend to pictures or objects, or listen quietly to music or stories or verses, and readily understand in what spirit they are to treat these apparently dissimilar things. They may also be encouraged to contemplate works of nature, which are unlike works of art, yet also like them in being 'beautiful.

the idea of "extension" makes sense to me because art and the world can't be as easily divided as we sometimes imagine. One comes from the other, and they intermingle in the consciousness we as readers meet on the page. Art can and does make life, as James says, because when we encounter a great work of art if creates feeling, and that feeling in the reader, the viewer, or the listener is finally what the work means.

The idea that people can be improved by being offended will finally have to meet the idea (espoused some of the time by some of the same people) that books, popular songs, movies, television shows, sex videos, and so on are "just fiction" or "just art" and therefore exist "for their own sake" and have no influence. To argue that works of art are "only" fictions or self-expressions and therefore cannot cause bad behavior is to argue also that they cannot cause good behavior. It is, moreover, to make an absolute division between art and life, experience and life, mind and body - a division that is intolerable to anyone who is at all serious about being a human or a member of a community or even a citizen.

(T)he increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.

The importance of resolution over craft is one of the most important shifts in art making besides the creation of Photoshop.

The inner drama is the meaning of the exterior event.

The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it.

The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.

Their insanity was affecting my sanity until I found my antidote in art.

The key to being an artist lies in one's sensitivity to the things which are normally overlooked. If you want to create images - learn how to observe. If you want to create sound - learn how to listen

The joy and power of portraiture is that it freezes us in time. Before the portrait, we were younger. After it has been created we will age or we will rot. Even Marc Quinn's chilled nightmare self-protraits in liquid silicone and blood can only preserve a specific moment in time: they cannot age and die as Quinn does and will. Ask the question, Who are we? and the portraits give us answers of a sort. We came from here, the old ones say. These were our kings and queens, our wise ones and our fools. We walk into the BP exhibition hall and they tell us who we are today: a confluence of artistic styles and approaches, of people we could pass in the streets. We look like this, naked and clothed, they tell us. We are here, in this image, because a painter had something to say. Because we are all interesting. Because we cannot gaze into a mirror without being changed. Because we do not know who we are, but sometimes there is a light caught in someone's eyes, that comes close to giving us the tiniest hint of an answer.

The kindest thing you can do for the dead... is to weave their names into art.

The last time I had a dick in my mouth I was dying alfalfa withered in rows unable to separate desire from pain There are poets for whom this throbbing is healing My Frida rail-impaled my chingona fighting for whole even after gangrene She loved her body though it betrayed

...the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus inflence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.

The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.

The lonesome and desperate kids out there, that pain will translate to magic perhaps.

The Lost Cause's Confederacy of gallant leaders and storied victories in defense of home ground retains enormous vitality in recent artworks. "Happy Birthday General Lee" proclaims an advertisement for three prints tied to the 200th anniversary of the general's birth. Grant receives fewer such gestures, and his cause, which confirmed American nationalism and forced a redefinition of United States citizenship, has been reduced to little more than prints of a battle in Pennsylvania, a college professor who did well as a soldier, and a few thousand men who fought under green flags.

...the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

The local Red Cross chapter volunteered to publish his book. It came out in a deluxe, gold-embossed, Japanese-paper edition to remind the reader of human artistry, which can be a refuge from evil and a source of new, platonic stirrings. One copy was reserved for His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II. (The Tsar fairly devoured mystical works, believing that hell could be avoided by a combination of education and deceit.) "The Book of Kings and Fools," p. 136.

The longer Ellen Cherry thought about it, the more convinced she became that the mission of the artist in an overtechnologized, overmasculinized society was to call the old magic back to life. Could it be done? Yeah, you pessimistic wimps, it could. Could she do it? Probably not, but she could give it a whirl.

The longer the night gets, the longer the dream gets, and the darker it gets, the lighter your imagination becomes, so the darkness is yours and the shadows are as colored as their depth and suddenly you are an artist. You close your eyes and they get lucid, you close your eyes and they get real. You would think it hurts in the morning but for an artist, the painting is enough, and for an imagination like that the dream is enough. So you wake up and reality becomes more than enough, you don't settle so you know it must be true "The world must be a piece of art." So close your eyes and let your heart work your brain, because when we wake up, he gets back in charge.

The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

The machinery of the sky that confounds us on earth with endless transformations of clouds in the light of dawn does not compare to the extraordinary tenacity of human beings, the way of human life, the presentiment of approaching death, the existence of love, the brilliant coruscations of light and the dark scars of our lives, to say nothing of the incomprehensible form of the cosmos and the overwhelming mysteries of space, time, distance.

The male frog, in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs - it's been documented - discover that if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears much larger than it really is." "So?" "So that's what art is, for the artist," said Crake. "An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid." "Your analogy falls down when it comes to female artists," said Jimmy. "They're not in it to get laid. They'd gain no biological advantage from amplifying themselves, since potential mates would be deterred rather than attracted by this sort of amplification. Men aren't frogs, they don't want women who are ten times bigger than them." "Female artists are biologically confused," said Crake.

The material's out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in.

The marine corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swabjockies, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because those candyasses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not, he will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that marine: he has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier, or swabbie, or desk jockey, because this is war, baby, and war is hell.

The market follows the artist. The artist does not follow the market.