Quotes About Art

Ninguno de nosotros podrá recuperar jamás aquella inocencia anterior a toda teoría, cuando el arte no se veía obligado a justificarse

In one of its aspects, art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention. The history of the arts is tantamount to the discovery & formulation of a repertory of objects on which to lavish attention. (Oscar Wilde pointed out that people didn't see fogs before certain nineteenth-century poets & painters taught them how to; & surely, no one saw as much of the variety & subtlety of the human face before the era of the movies.)

Cuando deciden la apariencia de una imagen, cuando prefieren una exposición a otra, los fotógrafos siempre imponen pautas a sus modelos. Aunque en un sentido la cámara en efecto captura la realidad, y no solo la interpreta, las fotografías son una interpretación del mundo tanto como las pinturas y los dibujos.

There is only so much revealing one can do. For every self-revelation, there has to be a self-concealment. A life-long commitment to writing involves a balancing of these incompatible needs.

camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions

Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt. Yet they always had, necessarily, a point of view.

Photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.

the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show "still." You can just show him being alive.

Pašovi invited me to see his Grad (City), a collage, with music, of declamations, partly drawn from texts by Constantine Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using a dozen actors;

queasiness. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals—that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not.

Eu estava pensando, Ursula disse a Quentin, que a diferença entre uma história e uma pintura ou uma fotografia é que numa história você pode escrever Ele continua vivo. Mas numa pintura ou numa foto não dá para representar esse continua. Você pode apenas mostrá-lo estando vivo. Ele continua vivo, Stephen disse.

Whether the photograph is understood as a naïve object or the work of an experienced artificer, its meaning—and the viewer's response—depends on how the picture is identified or misidentified; that is, on words.

She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.

Reproducing nature slavishly is not art.

Things will change, Father. They must. And art can help create the change.

At some times in our lives, our passion makes us perpetrators of hurt and loss. At other times we are the ones who are hurt—all in the name of art. Sometimes we get what we want. Sometimes we pay for another to get what he or she wants.

painting. Carefully, I took down the goat, the chicken, and me and

I had brought something out of the earth, and it was used to make something beautiful.

Art for art's sake, we say, because beauty blesses humanity with a better life.

Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color.

Be courageous with color. Let it pour out of you.

We are not botanists. We are artists. Suggest nature, but conventionalize it. Stylize it. Simplify it to its contour lines to convey structure.

Regardless of Galileo's logic, the highest of arts, I realized, is to uplift the spirit, whatever means one uses.