ART QUOTES II
quotations about art
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Paris Review, spring 1956
It's hard to believe that this long ago we--meaning Cro-Magnon modern humans--were the ones who invented art. Not every cave has gorgeous art, but the ones that do are spectacular. They utilize the bumps and the dips in the cave walls; it's not a flat surface like a painting. When you turn off the flashlight and strike a match instead, in that flickering light the shadows of these dips in the cave walls kind of move, and it almost makes you feel like those animals are alive. It's pretty spectacular.
JEAN M. AUEL
interview, goodreads, April 2011
Art is becoming one of the indispensable factors influencing the organization of everyday life. It is present everywhere and nowhere. It is becoming a fluid. It stands outside all professions. It cannot be isolated, it cannot be worshipped, it cannot be converted into money. None of this is possible. It is irreversibly dissolved in the solution of burgeoning human existence.
MILAN KNIZAK
"Aktual Univerzity: Ten Lessons", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
It is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truths, to mouths like mine at least.
ROBERT BROWNING
The Ring and the Book
An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
J. D. SALINGER
Zooey
Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you.... It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
attributed, Words of Wisdom
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
JEAN COCTEAU
The Paris Review, summer-fall 1964
The job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter consumers to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's reexamine it.
DAVIE MAMET
interview, Salon, 1997
It was the job of art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into awareness.
MICHAEL CRICHTON
Next
The arts stop society going rotten and mad.
VANESSA REDGRAVE
interview, FT Magazine, Apr. 26, 2013
Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.
JEAN M. AUEL
The Mammoth Hunters
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
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
The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
JOHN BARTH
attributed, Writers Dreaming
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
We live in a world full of urgent problems: climate change, terrorism and poverty, to name but three. We won't resolve them with brawn; they are obstacles we can only overcome by using our brains--when we are thinking like artists and not behaving like animals.
WILL GOMPERTZ
Think Like an Artist: and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
TONI MORRISON
Sula
Our mistake has been to categorize things as art by considering certain phases of the process of creation. But logically this can make all man-made objects art. It is more useful to categorize art by what has become its social function. It functions as property.
JOHN BERGER
Selected Essays of John Berger