ART QUOTES VI

quotations about art

Art quote

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

LEO TOLSTOY

What is Art?

Tags: Leo Tolstoy


Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.

LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON

Speak

Tags: emotion


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

Tags: Ermanno Bencivenga


Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO

Minima Moralia

Tags: Theodor W. Adorno


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

Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way?

FULKE GREVILLE

Maxims, Characters, and Reflections

Tags: Fulke Greville, perfection


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


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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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


A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

REBECCA WEST

The Strange Necessity

Tags: Rebecca West, universe


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

Tags: Douglas Carlton Abrams


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"

Tags: Oscar Wilde


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

Tags: Donald Burton Kuspit


There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views

Tags: Pablo Picasso, reality


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

Tags: W. H. Auden


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 is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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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


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

Tags: Dan Simmons


Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them.

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views

Tags: Pablo Picasso, understanding