Quotes About Art

This is one underlying reason why poetry is so often met with contempt rather than mere indifference and why it is periodically denounced as opposed to simply dismissed: Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.

Nietzsche called the ear "the organ of fear," and believed that the sense of hearing "could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life in the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London, 2001), p. 273. 24 That's what Tiggers: Ibid. 25 He was a very nice: Andrew, Defence of

Painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realization of infinity.

So long as a canvas is empty its potential is infinite… The empty canvas can become a gateway into the landscape of nightmares or a vision of sensual bliss.

If I don't say the thought right I might destroy it.

because genre is a construct for the purpose of commerce, not pleasure, and ultimately for the purpose of listening to less

Tone doesn't demonstrably exist in composed notes. It exists only in played ones. It's the most human part of music, the carrier of emotion.

after Jonas died, in 1970, of a heart attack—occupied herself with reading and painting.

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

If what any artist has to say is fundamentally human and profound the public will ultimately take his work unto itself. But if his own conceptions are limited and narrow in their human meaning it seems likely that time will erase his work.

Black culture has contributed hugely to American society: The civil rights movement brought meaning to American notions of equality and freedom; black contributions to politics, science, music, and art have helped enrich all of us. To demean these accomplishments and contributions by listing rap among them is to demean black culture as a whole.

In examining the history of cities, I looked for material in markets, souks and bazaars; in swimming pools, stadiums and parks; in street-food stalls, coffee houses and cafés; in shops, malls and department stores. I interrogated paintings, novels, films and songs as much as official records in search of the lived experience of cities and the intensity of their daily life.

Nella vita di tutti i giorni [i francesi] hanno portato al massimo grado di perfezione quell'arte che, fra tutte, è la più utile e la più gradevole, l' art de vivre , l'arte della società e della conversazione. - David Hume, The Philosophical Works

Art is a true aesthetic synthesis , "a priori" of feeling and image in the intuition, as to which it may be repeated that feeling without image is blind, and image without feeling is void.

O amor é uma arte que nunca se aprende e sempre se sabe.

El verdadero amor, el sólido y durable, nace del trato; lo demás es invención de los poetas, de los músicos y demás gente holgazana.

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

He hauled in Michelangelo, commanding the aged maestro to make the naked figures in The Last Judgment "suitable" for the papal chapel. Michelangelo hotly replied: "Let His Holiness make the world a more suitable place, and then the painting will follow suit." That was the last time Buonarroti had anything to do with Carafa.

Michelangelo's genius was in allowing the viewer to see a great deal—in order not to show what is best left secret, except to the knowledgeable few. In other words, he put in so many trees that we cannot see the forest.

In a world without cable channels and satellite television, videos and DVDs, movies and the Internet, an artist's creation was the one ever-present object that had to serve as a source of pleasure and inspiration over and over again, year after year, without becoming stale.