ART QUOTES XIII
quotations about art
Art never expresses anything but itself.
OSCAR WILDE
The Decay of Lying
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Art is a jealous mistress.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Conduct of Life
We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair ... pick another profession.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Letters to a Young Artist
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Decay of Lying", The Works of Oscar Wilde
Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Vague Thoughts on Art
Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
TOM STOPPARD
The Invention of Love
The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form -- to make it true and real to the theme, not to life.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"A Note on Realism", The Literary Review, Oct. 25, 1924
The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Truman Capote: Conversations
Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Woodburn Harris, February/March 1929
At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history every published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but not recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Art is what you can get away with.
ANDY WARHOL
attributed, If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Goal
I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
New York Quarterly, 1985
Art is long, and the talk about it is even longer.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?