ART QUOTES IV
quotations about art
Art is a language that doesn't need to be translated.
AHMAD HARIRI
"How art is helping Syrian refugees keep their culture alive", The Guardian, March 2, 2016
I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
"Riding with Death: The Final Years", Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988
All passes. Art alone
Enduring stays to us;
The Bust outlasts the throne,--
The Coin, Tiberius.
HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON
Ars Victrix
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
The artist does not really create; he discovers.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Great Companion
You need the art in order to love the life.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Art, even as poetry, was to become not an escape from the narrowness of lived reality, but the overflow of intensified life.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
The arts stop society going rotten and mad.
VANESSA REDGRAVE
interview, FT Magazine, Apr. 26, 2013
Art is not Nature, art is Nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
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
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.
MARY OLIVER
The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9, 1992
No art is possible without a dance with death.
KURT VONNEGUT
Slaughterhouse-Five
Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, Paper Magazine, September 17, 2014
One of the things pounded in to my head at the university level was that art is communication. So showing your art is not only good for your ego, but it's discovering you can be part of this conversation that has been going on as long as people have been painting in caves.
ROBERT LEMMING
"Art Is Communication: Artist turned teacher encourages conversation", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 11, 2016
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
Whether it is the beautiful that brings to our hearts the love of truth and justice, or whether it is truth that teaches us how to find the beautiful in nature and how to love it, in either case art does a noble work. It drags out the soul from its everyday shell, and brings it under the spell of its own mysterious and wonderful power, so that a memory of this experience stays with the people, sustains them in their daily labors, and refines their minds.
HELENA MODJESKA
"Women and the Stage", The World's Congress of Representative Women
When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.
HOWARD ZINN
"Artists of Resistance", The Historic Unfulfilled Promise