quotations about art
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
The work of art is a revelation of the innate goodness of matter. Matter narcissistically mirrors itself in art, with the artist's hidden hand that holds the mirror up, the impersonal mechanism by means of which matter makes its perfection manifest.
DONALD BURTON KUSPIT
Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries
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"
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
YANN MARTEL
Life of Pi
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
MAXIM GORKY
Untimely Thoughts
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.
TOM ROBBINS
Skinny Legs and All
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Economist, Sep. 15, 2010
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"My Bill of Rights", The Diabolical Principle
The artist's path sometimes is slippery as well. I just have to stay on it.
KRISHNA MATHIAS
"With preparation, making art is inevitable", Press of Atlantic City, March 8, 2016
I'd always thought of art as something that was expressed through certain tools: painting, sculpture, photography, writing, film, music, architecture. And yes, performance. But this performance went beyond performance. This was life.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Walk Through Walls: A Memoir
Art is a jealous mistress.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Conduct of Life
Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds.
PETER ABRAHAMS
End of Story
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
Art is the signature of man.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Everlasting Man
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
Art is not imitation but illusion.
CHARLES READE
Christie Johnstone
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
The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
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