Quotes About Art

Both high art and industrially produced consumer art] bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.

In truth, the best works of art are by no means the most perfect ones, but rather those whose imperfection bears the most profound witness to their fundamental contradictions. That is why those works, whose success takes its measure from the failure of the world, assume something helpless, frail and disorganized under the gaze of contemporary cultural administration.

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.

Reduzidas a pura homenagem, as obras de arte pervertidas e corruptas são secretamente empurradas pelos beneficiados para o meio dos trastes, com os quais são assimiladas. Os consumidores podem se alegrar que haja tanta coisa para ver e ouvir. Praticamente pode-se ter tudo.

Important artworks constantly divulge new layers, they age, grow cold and die.

L'art est la magie délivrée du mensonge d'être vrai.

Toda "cultura pura" tem causado mal-estar aos porta-vozes do poder

All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgently needed critique, is garbage.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will be confused. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything. Confucius's

In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.

Well into her career, painters like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema or Léon Frédéric were still churning out the most dreadful pictures of childhood. Such artists strained after emotions, not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel.

Alma-Tadema and Frédéric could paint nothing that was truthful either to the world or to themselves.

The logic of an arms race came to rule in art: and legions of untalented hacks who came after Miró devoted themselves to thinking about what had never been done before rather than about what they wanted to express.

The social and cultural critic Theodor Adorno eloquently voiced this cast of mind when he proclaimed the final death of art after the Second World War. After Auschwitz, he said, it was no longer possible to produce fine art. The world had become too horrible. 'There is nothing innocuous left,' he declared. 'The

It goes without saying that the artists sympathized not with the actual working classes, but with their own idea of the working classes, rather as Marie Antoinette wished to live not as a real shepherdess but as her romanticized conception of a shepherdess.

And accordingly, the adolescent sensibility is one that prevails in much of the art world, where the most adolescent of goals, transgression, is still aimed at. Shock the parents, épater le bourgeois, such is the golden rule.

it is widely believed that the purpose of art is to challenge, to question, to transgress, never to celebrate, to harmonise, to console, to give meaning.

George Orwell once said that he wanted to turn political writing into an art:

Art is the stored honey of the human soul.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.