Quotes About Art

All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control.

How do you make art when the art that's all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes?

Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.

The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.

The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers....

Making a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there's another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.

Women's work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together—maintenance work as the great feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles called it in her Maintenance Art manifesto.

I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays . . ., more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more. . . . Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists.

The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and writing this book I now see how this is connected to the politics of hope and to those revolutionary days that are the days of creation of the world. Decentralization and direct democracy could, in one definition, be this politic in which people are producers, possessed of power and vision, in an unfinished world.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

In opening that essay, she wrote, "The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical…." Later in the essay, she adds, "Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactive, stifling. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish.

People disappear into their stories all the time. We live in stories and images, as immersed in them as though they were Wu Daozi's inkpots; we breathe in presuppositions and exhale further stories. We in the West have been muddled by Plato's assertion that art is imitation and illusion; we believe that it is a realm apart, one whose impact on our world is limited, one in which we do not live.

our interrogation of Woolf's reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, "Fuck this shit," which carried the same general message, and moved everyone on from the discussion.) After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas, and we were discussing Woolf because of the latter.

She leaned down and smelled the skin at Connor's shoulders right at the spots where, as Martha Graham might have said, his own wings might have been attached.

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one's own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

La gran Humanidad no tolera la belleza, quizá porque no puede vivir sin ella; el horror de la fealdad avanza cada día a pasos acelerados.

Art is the accomplice of love.

I don't like straight lines: men make them.