ART QUOTES VI
quotations about art
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
NORMAN MAILER
Western Review, winter 1959
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
JAMES BALDWIN
Esquire, April 1960
It is hard to convey the night-waking, body-trembling experience of putting a creation of one's soul out into the world for acceptance and rejection.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
guest post, The Dark Phantom, October 29, 2008
One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Reifications"
Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
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?
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.
AMY LOWELL
Tendencies in Modern Poetry
Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
Killing Yourself to Live
True art required the right amount of uncertainty, just as gourmet cooking needed the proper spices and flavors.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
You need the art in order to love the life.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilization, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
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
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
The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
MICHELLE OBAMA
remarks at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing, May 18, 2009
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for a living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Man and Superman
Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Art sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology
I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction -- you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night