Quotes About Art

Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.

Would you ask Picasso to explain 'Guernica?' Would you ask Nabokov to explain 'Lolita?' Would you ask Tolstoy about 'War and Peace?' No, you wouldn't dare.

So does the fact that corrupt officials the world over buy art, often anonymously, as a way to launder money. The uber-rich use it to dodge taxes. Warehouses in Geneva and New York are stacked with specially conditioned safes. There, great works are reduced to the equivalent of zeroes in anonymous bank accounts.

Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.

Art, Eliot wrote, is a guide to perception. It shows us how to look—or where to look—and then leaves us, as Virgil left Dante, to go beyond where the guide can take us.

most art mistakes itself for the universal when it is momentary

He told her the flowers in her painting contained exactly the purple substance of the flowers on the desk in front of her [...] Let us open the window and see if your painting can entice the butterflies.

a tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who's got it on his back.

Tattooing was unto itself its very own art form, old as the hills and stranger than time. Whether in rich, far-flung resorts or condemned cottages, glamorous prestige or ragged poverty, human hearts and souls were variable and would always require painting.

In a relationship, when does the art of compromise become compromising?

Theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts... I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind

I've only ever written to escape from hell - and it's never worked - but at the other end of it when you sit there and watch something and think that's the most perfect expression of hell that I felt then maybe it was worth it.

My world was the size of a crayon box, and it took every colour to draw her

Slowly, slowly, I accumulate sentences. I have no idea what I'm doing until suddenly it reveals itself, almost done.

Dying young can really help an art career along. It's the careerist's ultimate paradox.

It's a very romantic sentiment, but to think that you would die if you didn't write, well, I would definitely choose to not write and live.

I think often sadness is a great place to get songs from.

Sounds buzz around me, and I'm sure the painted dragonflies have come loose from the frieze on our walls to flap their wings in my ears, making my skin prickle and crawl as tides of sickness wash me away.

I have loved enough women to know how to paint. If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet.

Our lives are constantly changing. Different things become relevant at different times in our lives. We are motivated by our changing sensibilities. Why can that not be applied to art?

I'm an atheist, but I believe in art. I go to galleries like my mother went to church. It helps me understand the way I live.

Art needs motives that are more profound than profit if it is to maintain its difference from—and position above—other cultural forms.

Who, in 2007, would have thought that a drawing by Willem De Kooning would be a safer asset than shares in Lehman Brothers? By autumn 2008, this would clearly be the case.

Art is about experimenting and ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it's an intoxicating combination.