Quotes About Art

I see that martial artists and art gallery owners have a few things in common...We both get to say pretentious stuff that sounds way more insightful than it actually is.

Any gloss on authors, their character traits or biographies, hides the fact that only bad writing has an author, good writing does not.

But neither art nor aesthetics is alone in being doomed to this melancholy destiny of living not beyond their means, but beyond their ends.

The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.

When one looks at the emptiness of current art, the only question is how such a machine can continue to function in the absence of any new energy, in an atmosphere of critical disillusionment and commercial frenzy, and with all the players totally indifferent? If it can continue, how long will this illusion last? A hundred years, two hundred? This society is like a vessel whose edges move ever wider apart, and in which the water never comes to a boil.

The cultural greenhouse effect: the toxic cloud caused by emissions from millions of museums, galleries, festivals, conferences and symposiums is much more catastrophic than the disappearance of the ozone layer. The asphyxia caused by the activity of thousands of creative brains damages the quality of life more certainly than all the world's industrial pollution. And if no Tokyo Congress has yet managed to control technological pollution, what body could put a brake on cultural nuisance?

L'art ne meurt pas parce qu'il n'y en a plus ; il meurt parce qu'il y en a trop.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

Le cinéma, c'est l'écriture moderne dont l'encre est la lumière.

When I make a film, it is a sleep in which I am dreaming.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

A picture neither saddening nor gladdening I fear; neither beautiful nor ugly.

Poetry is a machine that manufactures love. Its other virtues escape me.

Il y a dans le dessin une très grande jouissance. L'écriture, c'est le dessin noué autrement. (...) Et quand je dessine, j'écris, et, peut-être, que quand j'ecris, je dessine.

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction, the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

Les expériences dangereuses, le monde les accepte dans le domaine de l'art parce qu'il ne prend pas l'art au sérieux, mais il les condamne dans la vie.

El poeta es un mentiroso que siempre dice la verdad.

Je sais que la poésie est indispensable, mais je ne sais pas à quoi.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood. –

tapestries to real animals.