Quotes About Art

There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art—like physical beauty in a person—is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

La más antigua experiencia del arte tiene que haberlo percibido como encantamiento o magia; el arte era un instrumento del ritual (las pinturas de las cuevas de Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etcétera). La primera teoría del arte, la de los filósofos griegos, proponía que el arte era mímesis, imitación de la realidad.

muitos fotógrafos continuam a preferir imagens a preto e branco, pois consideram-nas mais delicadas e sóbrias do que a cor - ou menos voyeuristas e menos sentimentais ou cruamente miméticas.

Para ser legítima como arte, la fotografía debe cultivar la noción del fotógrafo como auteur, y de que todas las fotografías realizadas por el mismo individuo configuran un corpus.

30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.

Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.

The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.

That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art.

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature. Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated. I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts. I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art.

Coleccionar fotografías es coleccionar el mundo.

What do I believe? In the private life, in holding up culture, in music, Shakespeare, old buildings…

La fotografía en un libro es, obviamente, la imagen de una imagen.

interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Así como la pintura se ha vuelto cada vez más conceptual, la poesía se ha definido cada vez más por su interés en lo visual.

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. - Susan Sontag

Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it and still being good.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art-and in criticism today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

el arte es útil, medicinalmente útil, en cuanto suscita y purga emociones peligrosas.

El contenido puede haber cambiado. Quizá sea ahora menos figurativo, menos lúcidamente realista. Pero aún se supone que una obra de arte es su contenido. O, como suele afirmarse hoy, que una obra de arte, por definición, dice algo («X dice que...», «X intenta decir que...», «Lo que X dijo...», etcétera, etcétera).