Quotes About Art

I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.

The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.

Je n'écris plus, je suis écrite. (p.86)

As John Ashbery once said, "Being a famous poet is the not the same thing as being famous.

That's the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what's in front of you. Cézanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt." He stopped and smiled at me. "Because that's what we are sure of.

Art can speak to what falls outside theory, and it can also embody felt ideas.

Most people aren't attacked by colors.

that 'now' you're talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it's impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present." I stroked his hair and paused. "I think I've always loved paintings for that reason. Somebody makes a canvas in time, but after it's made, a painting stays in the present.

You're saying that anything's art if people say it is? Even me?" "Exactly. It's perspective - not content.

There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.

You really believe that there are subjects that shouldn't be photographed?' George said. He spoke evenly and softly. 'Maybe I do,' I said, thinking aloud. 'You believe in censorship then,' said Stephen. I looked up at Stephen. His face was tight, combative. 'Not censorship,' I said slowly. 'That's external. I mean control from the inside. After all, pictures can lie, too, can convey falseness rather than truth.

A powerfully imagined event can evoke the same emotions as a real event. Few artists would contradict this, and yet there no doubt people who would find it odd that a fiction, when fully imagined, can create something parallel to the disruptions in madness, but what Freud called "sublimation" is the transformation of inner dramas, fears, and wounds into something else: a work of art outside the body of the artist.

Jackson Pollock.

Ideas become part of our perceptions, but we are not always conscious of them. The story of art is continually being revised by art movements, by money and collectors, by "definitive" museum shows, by new concerns, discoveries, and ideologies that alter the telling of the past. Every story yokes together disparate elements in time, and every story, by its very nature, leaps over a lot.

Without a viewer, a reader, a listener, art is dead. Something happens between me and it, an "it" that carries in itself another person's willed act, a thing suffused with another person's subjectivity, and in it I may feel pain, humor, sexual desire, discomfort. And that is why I don't treat artworks as I would treat a chair, but I don't treat them as a real person either.

In the arts feeling is always meaning.

Seeing is flux," he said. I mentioned the hidden narratives in his work, and he said that for him stories were like blood running through a body - paths of life. It was a revealing metaphor, and I never forgot it.

There were many books inside me by then, and yet these jolted me with their originality. I met the man before I read what he had written, but if I had not loved his work as I did or if he had not admired my writing, it would have changed things. Our work has been an intimate part of our love affair and marriage for twenty-three years, but what I read wasn't then and isn't now what I know when I'm with him. His work comes from the place in him I can't know.

Unato? tim trenuta?nim uvidima u ne?iji život, platna i materijali na njima imali su neku apstraktnu odliku, krajnju prazninu koja je izražavala bizarnost same smrtnosti, osje?aj da, ?ak i ako sa?uvamo svaku mrvicu života, nagomilamo ih na divovsku hrpu, a potom pažljivo prosijemo da izvu?emo sva mogu?a zna?enja, sve to zajedno opet ne?e sastaviti jedan život.

and she, in turn, had cast a spell over the art world through the magic of controversy.

In the arts," James wrote, "feeling is always meaning.

And later in the letter, he elaborated further, "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

James believed in the power of art, not because he thought it would change the world or because he imagined it could be a mirror of life. Art, he explains to Wells, is "for the extension of life, which is the novel's best gift.

the idea of "extension" makes sense to me because art and the world can't be as easily divided as we sometimes imagine. One comes from the other, and they intermingle in the consciousness we as readers meet on the page. Art can and does make life, as James says, because when we encounter a great work of art if creates feeling, and that feeling in the reader, the viewer, or the listener is finally what the work means.