ART QUOTES VII

quotations about art

Art quote

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

DAN SIMMONS

The Rise of Endymion

Tags: Dan Simmons, artists


Art is one of man's few serious activities.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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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"

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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

WILLIAM JAMES

letter to Henry Rutgers Marshall, Feb. 7, 1899

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Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

letter, Feb. 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet

Tags: Rainer Maria Rilke, criticism


I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

LOUISE NEVELSON

"Dawns and Dusks", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings

Tags: creativity, mind


But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.

RUDOLF ARNHEIM

Visual Thinking


A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

W. H. AUDEN

"A Poet of the Actual", Forewords and Afterwords

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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

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The work of art is a scapegoat surplus product, a dispensable cliche of form and meaning, having only the value the spectator--the symbol of society at large--gives it as he encounters it in the no man's land of the gallery or museum. He victimizes it and is victimized by it; he is ambivalent about it as it is in itself. It has a certain amount of authority, yet no more than he gives it by channeling his life-energy in its forms. In other words, it forces him to recognize his own authoritarian style, i.e., his tendency to treat his own identity as a finished form, but at the same time possessed of an energy that contradicts that form by reaching for other identities. The work of art teaches the spectator that he too is communal cliche and unfinished expression.

DONALD BURTON KUSPIT

Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries

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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

Tags: James Joyce, ideas


Art begins with resistance -- at the point where resistance is overcome.

ANDRE GIDE

Autumn Leaves

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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

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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

Tags: love


Don't worry about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

ANDY WARHOL

attributed, "Andy Warhol's Best Advice about Art", Flavorwire, August 6, 2012

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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

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The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

EDWARD ALBEE

Stretching My Mind

Tags: Edward Albee, reality


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

Tags: Anna Deavere Smith, perfection


That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.

OSCAR WILDE

"Art and the Handicraftsman"

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There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

CHARLES DICKENS

Nicholas Nickleby

Tags: Charles Dickens, painting