Quotes About Art

Was there anything more powerful than the ability to create beauty?

Se as pessoas não gostaseem de olhar para coisas atraentes, a arte não existiria.

painting, in music, in literature or theater? If so, did that make the rest of the world nothing more than the audience? Passive observers whose only contribution was applause or criticism?

Art is long, and time is fleeting.

The peculiarity of innovative fantasies in the form of works of art is that they are fantasies kindled by material which is accessible to many people. In a word, they are de-privatised fantasies. That sounds simple, but the whole difficulty of artistic creation shows itself when someone tries to cross this bridge — the bridge of de-privatisation. It could also be called the bridge of sublimation.

In other words, the more differentiated, relatively developed societies have cultivated a comparatively high tolerance for highly individualised ways of further developing the existing art canon; this facilitates experimentation and the breaching of stale conventions and can thus help to enrich the artistic pleasures available through seeing and hearing.

In the course of the changing relationship between those who produce art and those who need and buy it, the structure of art changes, not its value.

The pinnacle of artistic creation is achieved when the spontaneity and inventiveness of fantasy-stream are so fused with knowledge of the regularities of the material and the judgement of the artist's conscience that the innovative fantasies emerge as if by themselves in a way that matches the demands of both material and conscience. This is one of the most socially fruitful types of sublimation process.

My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

Far back in the impulses to find this story is a storyteller's belief that at times life takes on the shape of art and that the remembered remnants of these moments are largely what we come to mean by life. The short semihumours comedies we live, our long certain tragedies, and our springtime lyrics and limericks make up most of what we are. they become almost all of what we remember of ourselves.

Everything is fair in love and art.

Discomfort is sometimes what is most precious to me about great art.

It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine—something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game's violence would save it, and it would never go away.

A book become popular because of its text, but it's the subtext that makes it live forever. For the true obsessive, whatever an author doesn't explicitly explain ends up becoming everything that matters most (and since it's inevitably the obsessives who keep art alive, they make the rules).

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

Young people want mirrors. Older people want art.

Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.

Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

Just for the record, waking up on drugs with your pubic hair shaved and something plastic stuck in your vagina doesn't necessarily make you a real artist.

Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.