ART QUOTES III
quotations about art
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
We are all artists. We just have to believe it.
WILL GOMPERTZ
Think Like an Artist: and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life
Like most art students, I expect I'll find that there is no demand for what I've learned so I'll teach other students so that one day they can teach as well.
GUY BELLAMY
The Secret Lemonade Drinker
Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
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
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
attributed, Languages of Art
Art knows, life applies knowledge; art feels, life acts.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
RAY BRADBURY
preface, Zen in the Art of Writing
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
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
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
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
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
TONI MORRISON
Sula
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Modernite", La Peintre de la Vie Moderne
Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art should have political, spiritual, and surprising elements. It should try to find new language of communicating in order to give awareness to the public. Then every society can use the layer it needs at the moment. If one is interested in the political, they can take that. If the next one needs spiritual, it can be found in the same work. So if you just did one level, for example only political, it's like an old newspaper, you read it today and tomorrow it's old news. The art dies. Art with this kind of complexity has many lives where many societies can take something different at different times. It can live for centuries, otherwise who cares?
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
"Marina Abramovic Makes Sundance Shut Up", Interview Magazine
That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.
DANA SPIOTTA
Innocents and Others
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist".
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Marginalia"