Quotes About Art

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, Compassion, Art, Love. All of them are pointless. But, they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

Every vegetable, every bit of protein on the list had a provenance more complex than a minor Rembrandt.

I'm in the business of useless beauty, he says. And I'm happy with that. I don't think art needs an excuse to exist. We need beauty in our lives, so we don't go mad.

The art of presenting oneself, he had once told Sybil, lies in creating an immediate shock which is countered by a slow retreat into custom. People never quite recover from my cravats, but they will never find the equal of my tailor. To be memorable is all, when it comes to dress.

A m?vészek úgy aránylanak az emberi beszédhez, mint a felfedezÅ'k az utazáshoz.

Writing about music really is like dancing about architecture--and a good thing, too. Everything is like that.

A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry.

The mysterious quality of artworks is a signal of the mysterious quality of objects in general. Beauty is a secret that we know exists but whose content we don't know. When we share it with other, it's as if we are in on the same secret. We look at each other in amazement or with knowing look. But it's impossible to specify what this secret is. Only the fact that there is a secret is of any importance. Beauty is based on the raw fact of the secret as such.

Beauty is nonconceptual. Nothing in the object directly explains it.

I have little interest in illustration, which lacks a kind of transcendental quality. It is too literal. I find typography more straightforward, conceptual, and appealing, with its strict geometric vocabulary. There is a bridge between typographic design and fine art, especially since typography possesses a complex subtlety. The idea, the method, and the honesty in expression are central to a designer who works with type.

Some time around 1932, Adolf Loos, the noted Viennese architect, said, "There is a great difference between an urn and a chamber pot, and in this difference there is leeway for culture.

Learn about art, Captain," Thrawn said, his voice almost dreamy. "When you understand a species' art, you understand that species.

Estudie arte, Capitán. Si entiende el arte de una especie, entiende a esa especie.

Can I start by asking why your drawings abnormally suck?

Any questions? Ya why do your drawings suck so bad?

The stories you have to write will always make someone hate your guts. If they don't you're just producing words.

An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.

It is the devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine.

To hear some thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries say it, the people of Greece had it all figured out two millennia ago. That's not even remotely true, but what ancient Greece did accomplish in terms of science, architecture, literature, art, and philosophy is certainly enough to explain why so many people have come away with the impression.

Wilde's formulation of art's purpose: "[What art] seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Only centuries after the death of Jesus—by which time, astonishingly, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ—did his execution at last start to emerge as an acceptable theme for artists.

But after taking command of the Army of Italy in 1796, Napoleon took organized theft to a new level. ... The French also stole art at a new level: Napoleon requested that the government send him experts qualified to judge which paintings his men should steal; priceless canvases by Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and Leonardo da Vinci were shipped to Paris.

The trouble with you is that the only way you can communicate is through art. You've never learned to communicate your feelings to a man. You don't even want to communicate in a relationship. You think that if you open up to love, you'll lose your independence or your self-expression or creativity or whatever you call all that passionate, wonderful stuff that makes you feel alive inside.

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that's only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we're all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.