Quotes About Art

A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and much admired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning the sculptor admitted that he had used the head of the mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet—apparently he had a spare—in the hope that no one would notice or, having noticed, would care.

Behaviorally modern human beings—that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities—have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, painted here by his friend Jan Vermeer, was a self-taught instrument maker.

Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition's lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.

There is a painting by Asher Brown Durand called "Kindred Spirits," which is often reproduced in books when the subject turns to the American landscape in the nineteenth century.

One of the reasons the Mona Lisa looks enigmatic is that she has no eyebrows.

Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on earth, and their art goes back to the very roots of it. Imagine if there were some people in France who could take you to the caves at Lascaux and explain in detail the significance of the paintings—

The most expensive of all was verdigris, which was made by hanging copper strips over a vat of horse dung and vinegar and then scraping off the oxidized copper that resulted. It is the same process that turns copper domes and statues green – just quicker and more commercial – and it made 'the delicatest Grass-green in the world', as one eighteenth-century admirer enthused. A room painted in verdigris always produced an appreciative 'ah' in visitors.

Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the great artist and found several watercolors of a cheerfully erotic nature. Horrified, Ruskin decided that they could only have been drawn "under a certain condition of insanity," and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all of them, robbing posterity of several priceless works.

Albert Snyder's mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of Motor Boating magazine, had developed an infatuation with an office secretary of high spirits and light intellect named Ruth Brown.

It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he'd had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted. The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait known that might have been done from life, so this would be what William Shakespeare really looked like—if it is William Shakespeare.

If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623—the famous First Folio.

New Rule: Any tattoo that has more than one line is too long.

Because art does for me what religion does-- it organizes a seemingly chaotic world. Because it is my way of making sense of the world and its changes.

When I am in pain, I must know that beauty always has been and always will be. This is as close to eternity as I need to be.

I like my smock. You can tell the quality of the artist by the quality of his smock. Actually, I just like to say smock. Smock smock smock smock smock smock.

Verbing weirds language.

People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.

Van Gogh would've sold more than one painting if he'd put tigers in them.

Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.

I'm leaking brain lubricant.

You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

If you find a tune and it's got something to do with you, you don't have to evolve anything. You just feel it, and when you sing it other people can feel something too.

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.