Quotes About Art

It seems to me that a spiritual sensibility is built into human nature. Formal religion may or may not disappear but art, love and a desire to find beauty will remain.

Bertrand Russell wrote about the beauty of mathematical science: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

That's the thing with good poets. They structure and decide and re-write and insert, but some of the magic comes from the place beyond intention. It just falls from them like windfall fruit.

Any fool can have bad luck the art consists in knowing how to exploit it.

Without the Nazis fewer people would have heard of the Bauhaus today and it would almost certainly seem a little less important. It is a pleasant irony.

We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls

Forgeries are an ever-changing portrait of human desires. Each society, each generation, fakes the things it covets most

Art is the business of selling fetishes, sacred relics once touched by genius: what the forger offers the gullible buyer is not art, it is "authenticity

Dada was not an art, it was anti-art, a credo ruled by absurdity, nonsense, chance and chaos, a rejection of everything that Han believed, cherished, practiced - and it was to change art for ever

Vermeer's skill was in combining few colors, mixing little and using layers of lakes and varnishes to build up the illusion of life

An artist must paint not simply surface light, but what is inside, what he sees within his subject

Jazz is not dead - it just smells funny

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

Music is always a commentary on society.

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

I think actors are divided into two groups: one that wants to be an actor to become famous and rich, and the other that wants to be an actor because they have to be. I'm more in the second group.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Every time an artist dies, part of the vision of mankind passes with him.

Originality is the art of concealing your source.