Quotes About Art

There is no law against composing music when one has no ideas whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal

The speech of man is like embroidered tapestries, since like them this too has to be extended in order to display its patterns, but when it is rolled up it conceals and distorts them.

Cicala to cicala is dear, and ant to ant,And kestrels dear to kestrels, but to me the Muse and song.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being true.

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

Erst Kunst und dann Nusseis, das ist die richtige Reihenfolge.

Anstaunen ist auch eine Kunst. Es gehört etwas dazu, Großes als groß zu begreifen.

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.

Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.

The subjectivist approach to art simply fails to understand that the subjective experience of art in itself is meaningless, and that in order to grasp the importance of art one has to zero in on the artistic object rather than on the fun of the art lover.