ART QUOTES V
quotations about art
The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Death in the Afternoon
Realism and art cannot live together.
JENNETTE LEE
The Ibsen Secret
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
attributed, Languages of Art
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
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
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
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
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
Art ... is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
interview, July 5, 2005
Art begins with resistance -- at the point where resistance is overcome.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
Art -- the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
JAMES THURBER
Collecting Himself
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
JEAN COCTEAU
Newsweek, May 16, 1955
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
Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.
LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON
Speak
I believe that economic prosperity and cultural wealth go hand in hand. This is why it is important to even further promote the cultural arts during times of economic slowdown.
OH SEUNG-JE
"All That Korean Art Is There for a Reason", New York Times, March 16, 2016
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
The meaning of a work of art is what the artist wants to communicate to his public through the work, by using a specific language. Since every language has its limitations and its problems of expression, there will be obstacles to communicating certain contents: a work's value is to be found in the ingenuity, the originality, and perhaps the economy of the solutions the artist finds to overcome these obstacles.
ERMANNO BENCIVENGA
Philosophy in Play
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO TOLSTOY
What is Art?
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia