Quotes About Art

A painting is never finished. You just stop working on it." This idea will be familiar to anyone who has worked on software.

no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it."1

In too many places, kitchen efficiency has become a lost art.

Most popular accounts of science and many philosophical analyses are therefor chimeras, pure and simple. They are distorted and misleading as a history of art which regards paintings as natural phenomena of a special kind without ever mentioning the individuals lingering in their neighborhood when they first appear.

People going to see the Mona Lisa, not to look at it, but because it's the Mona Lisa

let me understand this musical theater nonsense—you're being gay for credit, right?

It's actually very difficult to make something both simple and good.

Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears.

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

But art should require no instrument but memory.

This is getting depressing," Julieta said. "Let's go to the Casa Azul." The Blue House, in Coyoacán, a short walk from the restaurant, was where Frida Kahlo had been born, grew up, and lived with Diego Rivera.

Now a museum, it was filled with Frida's startling paintings and also many of Diego's, family photographs and paraphernalia, such as the corsets and leg braces that the wounded (thirty operations, including an amputated leg) Frida had worn. Out of the small, stifling rooms, the courtyard was a suburban jungle of tamed vines and trimmed trees, the whole house a work of art, a kind of habitable sculpture.

Frida is a detour and a distraction. It was her genius as an artist, and her neurotic narcissism, to turn her whole self into art—her love, her suffering, her accident-prone life—and in the process make herself an icon, for the Mexican tradition is full of icons, especially of madonnas.

Why see death as a hangman when it is truer to see it as a harvester leveling the earth with its scythe? Oddly, we take hope from the seasons — the rebirth of spring after the death of winter — or from the rising and setting of the sun. But no spring, no dawn beyond death, has ever been proven. Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

I went to the Yungang Caves outside Datong, where travelers used to draw chalk circles on the beautiful frescoes and Chinese workmen would hack them off the wall and wrap them up; and where another lively business was the beheading of Buddhas. Even so, there are plenty of Buddhas left-and several in the larger caves are as tall as a three-story building.

Whenever an art form—music, book, drama, song—is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art—even the obscene, semiliterate yawp and grunt of rap—drains the life from it.

The woman went to a table at the side and selected a ghoulish picture the size of a playing card. "How much?" "What you wish." I gave her some pesos, saying, "I'll come back." "This"—she tapped the picture—"will keep you safe.

How can we ultimately fail to twig that the apparent impiety of contemporary art is only ever the inverted image of sacred art, the reversal of the creator's initial question: why is there something instead of nothing?

Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset - tears are words waiting to be written.

Love isn't just a feeling. It's an art. And like any art, it takes not only inspiration but also a lot of work.

You have understood what all great painters understand: in order to forget the rules, you must know them and respect them.

The art of love is like your painting, it requires technique, patience, and above all, practice by the couple. It requires boldness, the courage to go beyond what people conventionally call making love.