Quotes About Art

Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.

In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

I don't like theorizing about my work myself, but that's not to say I have no interest in theory. Other people are free to say what they want about my work.

I hope I make films where you walk away . . . with work to do, arguments to have, things to worry about, things to care about. In that sense, I would regard what I do as political.

The finest productions of human art are immensely short of the meanest work of Nature. The nicest artist cannot make a feather or the leaf of a tree.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

I could work out a lot of my emotions by going to class and dancing.

We are...a Divine work of art, something that God is making...something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.

The English mist is always at work like a subtle painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for the mist to work on.

Develop a mailing list... anyone who comes through your studio or meets you at art shows or anywhere. It's the power of permission-based marketing. Email your latest work to the list, every month.

The writing for me is hard work and I always look forward to drawing the pictures.

The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people.

This is something essential to art: reception is never its goal. What counts for me is that my work provides material to reflect upon. Reflection is an activity.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.

But if you're talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.

Gene Wolfe has produced a work of art that can satisfy adult appetites and in which even the most fantastical elements register as poetry rather than as penny-whistle whimsy.

Working outdoors or from life puts you in direct contact with the life force, not just the light and the landscape, but also the vitality of the world around you.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

You know what you are actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.

I did all the work at the beginning up until the point where I couldn't handle the increasingly heavy art production burden alone. I needed, and got, assistance.

As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

Art is the space between the viewer and the rectangle that hangs on the wall. Unless something of the person that created the work is there, there's nothing for the viewer to take away.

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.