Quotes About Art

a culture medium for a medium culture.

The best we can do is to be good at something, or a few things. We come home tired, and we feel the need to veg out—a recent coinage, meaning to drop voluntarily into a kind of vegetative coma, typically in front of the TV. I should know; in my family, I am infamous for my lowbrow tastes in entertainment, my sluggishness to attend art films and theatrical productions.

Truth and politics do not and cannot mix because politics is the art of saying only what needs to be said—and saying it in just the right way—in order to achieve a desired end.

SUICIDAL IDEATION. That would be a good band name, I think.

When we got together we would start projects: an alarm clock torn apart and distributed over a wall, a stop-motion video of Lego people having sex, a Web site for pictures of toilets.

I saw a painting once where the artist had actually done that--signed his work in blood. ... When I saw that, I thought it was as if the man who had painted the picture wanted to say to me, Well, you did ask what this actually cost.

Each component of this trinity of human endeavor—science, religion, and art—lays powerful claim to our feelings of wonder, which derive from an embrace of the mysterious. Where mystery is absent, there can be no wonder.

On canvas with paint In the Artist's school It's red that is hot And blue that is cool. But in science we show As the heat gets higher That a star will glow red Like the coals of a fire. Raise the heat some more And what is in sight? It's no longer red It has turned bright white. Yet the hottest of all, Merlin says unto you, Is neither white nor red When the star has turned blue.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

I don't like to see Shakespeare in a theater. I like to see Shakespeare in the park.

But you'll see producers and theatre owners with a billion dollars worth of theaters come in here for lunch and you know why? Because it's cheap. You see those pictures on the wall? All young actors and actresses who you will never hear about in your life... And when 'dis place is gone, the entire Broadway will slide into the East River.

What do we get out of entering other people's suffering in art, when we often avoid it in life?

Psaní dává lidskému životu urÃ…â"¢itou d?stojnost. I kdyby to nikdy nikdo ne?etl, aspo? nÄ›co dÄ›láte. Pracujete na té nejd?ležitÄ›jÅ¡í vÄ›ci... RozhodnÄ› je to lepÅ¡í než psát reklamní texty. Neutloukáte se aspo? v plytkostech. A máte Å¡anci pohovoÃ…â"¢it si s tÄ›mi, kteÃ…â"¢í se dosud nenarodili.

The Rape of the Sabines," by Da Bologna, which is one of the few classical paintings I can name. Sometimes I wonder about myself.

paintings. I recognized "The Rape of the Sabines," by Da Bologna, which is one of the few classical paintings I can name.

Over the fireplace, he has a reproduction of Rubens' Rape of the Sabine Women." I added, in case Mr. Mancuso wasn't familiar with the classical tale, "The Romans raped the women of the Sabine tribe.

Written words can also sing.

A sculptor will more easily extract a beautiful statue from a piece of rough marble than from one that has been badly blocked out by someone else.

In The Prince Machiavelli mounts two distinct lines of intellectual and political attack, one against the baseness of Medicean statecraft, the other against the too-strict Ciceronian conception of politics. Against both traditions, he elaborates a new 'art of the state'. He openly declares himself to be an expert in this art.

There could be a powerful international women's rights movement if only philanthropists would donate as much to real women as to paintings and sculptures of women.

Like a clap of thunder, at a high decibel level yet with a suddenly squeaky voice, as high as it was loud, with his flying white hair in the light of the slide projector and therefore magnified a hundredfold as filaments gone haywire over the exquisitely painted van Eyck, Professor Schapiro shouted out, "He's pissing! He's pissing!

Anni and Josef Albers's house was the whitest place imaginable.

Albers celebrated the way that color and line have no truth of their own; what matters is their perception, which depends on what is adjacent to them.

iPhones are not the Elgin Marbles, or Stonehenge, or anything else where part of the miracle is that it lasts.