ART QUOTES VI

quotations about art

Art quote

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Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

TOM STOPPARD
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"Artist Descending a Staircase"


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Tags: Tom Stoppard, imagination


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


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Tags: life


An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

JEAN COCTEAU

Newsweek, May 16, 1955


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Tags: Jean Cocteau, artists


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


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Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, nature


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


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Tags: Henry Miller, chaos


We few, we happy few. No, we lucky few! Artists, wake up. Be gratified when our art is not taken by museums to rot in their storage vaults, probably never to be seen again. We should appreciate that we can and will survive without museums and the finely crafted words of those who will never know what it's like to create. Pick up some sand and run it through your fingers. Consider the long span of geological history and realize that our civilization won't last. All paintings and sculpture, including the great works of art, will be treated equally by time -- reduced to ashes and dust. This recognition puts me in my place but it is also a relief. Accepting mortality gives me the freedom to work without restraint, boundary or expectation.

BEN PERRONE

"Freedom to create art is a wonderful thing", Buffalo News, March 22, 2016


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True art, like nature, ever bears
Suggestions of some higher thing;
As more than form or tint of bird
We prize the song he stops to sing.

EDITH WILLIS LINN FORBES

"A Landscape in Oils"


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Never judge a work of art by its defects.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON

attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern


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Tags: Washington Allston


It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

ANAIS NIN

attributed, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations


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Tags: Anais Nin, perception


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


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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


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Art is a little subversive, very subversive; it gets underneath the surface and reveals what is there; it is a Geiger counter for truth.

PAT B. ALLEN

Art Is a Spiritual Path


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Tags: Pat B. Allen, truth


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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Tags: Donald Burton Kuspit


The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


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Tags: Austin O'Malley


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


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Tags: Anna Deavere Smith, perfection


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


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Tags: Fran Lebowitz


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


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Tags: George Santayana


Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

TONI MORRISON

Sula


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Tags: Toni Morrison, artists


I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm.

SAUL BELLOW

The Paris Review, winter 1966


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Tags: Saul Bellow, chaos


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


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Tags: Mary Oliver, imagination