Art is a vehicle that allows us to transcend linear time, to travel backward and forward into personal and transpersonal history, into possibilities that weren't realized and those that might be.
PAT B. ALLEN, introduction, Art Is a Spiritual Path
Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.
DAN SIMMONS, The Fall of Hyperion
Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds.
PETER ABRAHAMS, End of Story
You're an artist ... that means you see the world in ways that other people don't. It's your gift, to see the beauty and the horror in ordinary things. It doesn't make you crazy--just different. There's nothing wrong with being different.
CASSANDRA CLARE, City of Bones
Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated, just as for a mother the cause of sexual conception is love. The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife's love is the birth of a new man into life. The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength.
LEO TOLSTOY, What Is Art?
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
Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH, Letters to a Young Artist
When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.
HENRY MILLER, Tropic of Cancer
Art is a little subversive, very subversive; it gets underneath the surface and reveals what is there; it is a Geiger counter for truth.
PAT B. ALLEN, Art Is a Spiritual Path
Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.
DAN SIMMONS, The Fall of Hyperion
- 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.
They say that art should stand the test of time. Life lasts a limited amount of time. Mountains and trees and earth will outlive human beings, but we don't know if they will be here always. Art does outlast the life span of its maker. Art should communicate to an increasing circle of strangers--people who do now know the artist, but come to know the work, and through the work, come to know something about the humanity of the artist that rings with their own humanity.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH, Letters to a Young Artist
Art is a way of knowing what it is we actually believe.
PAT. B. ALLEN, Art Is a Way of Knowing
The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.
LEO TOLSTOY, What Is Art?
Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.
BAKER BROWNELL, Art Is Action
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
LEO TOLSTOY, What Is Art?
Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, preface, Salon of 1846
Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.
LEO TOLSTOY, What Is Art?
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 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 scope of art is practically boundless; it does not begin and end with the painting of pictures and the modelling of statues; where there is room for workmanship there is room for it.
LEWIS FOREMAN DAY, Everyday Art
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
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