Quotes About Art

like the ghastly mouth in Edvard Munch's painting The Scream.

Nathanael West's Day of the Locust.

Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.

He believes that a real work of art can be owned but should not be subject to capture; that it should radiate such authority, such bizarre but confident beauty (or unbeauty) that it can't be undone by even the most ludicrous sofas or side tables. A real work of art should rule the room, and the clients should call up not to complain about the art but to say that the art has helped them understand how the room is all a horrible mistake, can Peter suggest a designer to help them start over again.

The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects.

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen and follow it with her hand as it moves across the paper; she may pick up her pen and find she's merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen, afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea about where to begin or what to write. She picks up her pen

While I love most, not to say all, of James Thurber's cartoons, there are a handful that seem especially

In art, it thrives in the rarefied arena of the avant-garde. In business, The Entrepreneur is the innovator, the grand strategist, the creator of new methods

She painted because she loved to paint. She never exhibited. She had no career, no ambitions for her work except that it be good, and she didn't care what we thought of it.

Agatha says that, nowadays, things that people have just written can be almost as valuable as pictures they've painted.

Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job. The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression.

Children dawdle to look at what adults hurry past. They take time because they have time. They see the world through fresh eyes. Maybe this is why artists who push us to look more carefully at simple things may also strike a slightly melancholic note. They remind us of a childlike condition of wonderment that we abandoned once we became adults and that we need art to highlight occasionally, if only to recall for us what we have given up.

Collecting is a way to bring order to the world, which is what museums, our public collectors, do.

The ecstasy of creation is when, as an artist, you are one with and totally absorbed in the act. It is the same experience whether it is the act of painting, making music, or writing. The experience really obliterates all other considerations at that moment. The act of re-creating the visual experience o the models in front of me is absolutely absorbing, leaving no room for extraneous thoughts, sexual or otherwise. My routine is my way of controlling hysteria.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.

all this Beethoven and rain

I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucien Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

We have art,' Nietzsche said, 'so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Don`t talk to me about Matisse the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio where the nude style woman reclines forever on a sheet of blood. Talk to me instead about the culture generally how the murderers were sustained by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote villages the painters came, and our white-washed mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.

Character, that subtle art, disappeared among them during those days and nights, existed only in a book or on a painted wall.

This is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us. Just as there is, in the real landscape of Paris in Les Misérables, that small fictional street Victor Hugo provides for Jean Valjean to slip into, in which to hide from his pursuers.

There are no brunettes...among Florentine Madonnas.

Ora li amava, questi libri rilegati con i dorsi all'italiana, i frontespizi, le illustrazioni ad acquerello, le copertine telate, amava il loro odore, perfino i loro scricchiolii quando li apriva in fetta, quasi si rompesse una serie di minuscole ossa invisibili.