ART QUOTES XIII

quotations about art

Art quote

Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views

Tags: Pablo Picasso, modesty


I'm very picky when it comes to the art I like. What most people would consider to be a genius piece of work, I look at and feel absolutely nothing. I can appreciate and be impressed by the work that goes into creating something like a sculpture or a painting but if it doesn't "speak" to me then I'm simply not going to have some kind of emotional reaction.

JONATHAN BARKAN

"This Art is as Mysterious and Beautiful as it is Macabre", Bloody Disgusting, March 18, 2016


Artists need to be realistic as to why they create and whom they are painting for. The one caveat is that you must respect what you do. Potboilers, painted solely for the money, will only get you so far and then the truth will seep out and ... well, it's not a pretty sight.

JAMES GUPPY

"Judging art is a classic business", Echo Netdaily, March 16, 2016


No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society

Tags: Antonin Artaud


Art is what you can get away with.

ANDY WARHOL

attributed, If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend

Tags: Andy Warhol


How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for.

JULIAN BARNES

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Tags: Julian Barnes


The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

The Goal

Tags: Yevgeny Zamyatin


The shapely female form has no place in Art!

PRINCIPAL SKINNER

The Simpsons

Tags: The Simpsons


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

Tags: John Galsworthy


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

Tags: Anna Deavere Smith


Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Antic Hay

Tags: Aldous Huxley, suffering


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

Tags: Samuel R. Delany, magic


The scope of art is practically boundless; it does not begin and end with the painting of pictures and the modeling of statues; where there is room for workmanship there is room for it.

LEWIS FOREMAN DAY

Everyday Art

Tags: Lewis Foreman Day


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?

Tags: Leo Tolstoy, beauty


The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

Stranger in a Strange Land

Tags: Robert A. Heinlein


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

Tags: Nicholson Baker


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"

Tags: J. D. Salinger, beauty


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


Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

OSCAR WILDE

"The Decay of Lying", The Works of Oscar Wilde

Tags: Oscar Wilde


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

Tags: H. P. Lovecraft