Quotes About Art

Recently, I've discovered Radiohead and find them to be quite good. So clearly, I'm some kind of musical retard. (Jonathan Ames, Middle-American Gothic)

What can one do with one's hands when the camera is interested in other things?

Oscar Wilde wrote, Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascination... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write.

This is something Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens wrote, or whatever: To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.

Unable to explore setting, conflict, characters or themes in their fiction, the mainstreamers wrote more and more eloquently about nothing at all.

The art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of our great men. —Capt. J. A. Hatfield

Getting things done, and feeling good about it, means being willing to recognize, acknowledge, and appropriately manage all the things that have your consciousness engaged. Mastering the art of stress-free productivity requires it.

Mum has made a little model of Dad - it looks nothing like him, of course, at least not when I compare it with his photographs, but somehow it seems to be more like him than the photographs do.

It needn't look like any particular thing at all. How could we imagine that we could make a world as perfect and as lovely as the world that God has made? All we can do is to do our best. Paint and draw. Create your own beautiful imperfect world.

clay, collodion to make scars

what I do have, and so are my clients." He took the piece he was carrying and set it up on an empty easel but did not uncover it.

and my signature is drawn in magic marker on the lower right hand corner of the window so when something passes in the dark it's captured for a moment inside my work.

Nude descending a staircase headless, not knowing where she is going but brave because all dreams lack conclusions and she is not enlisted to an ending.

thought with totality as its content has to be considered as an art form, like poetry, whose function is primarily to give rise to a new perception, and to action that is implicit in this perception, rather than to communicate reflective knowledge of how everything is. This implies that there can no more be an ultimate form of such thought than there could be an ultimate poem (that would make all further poems unnecessary).

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author, There is no authoritative active voice. There are only multiple readings.

The only art I'll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.

Music has both been my doorway to perception and the house I live in

It behoves the art establishment to elevate them to a higher plateau as fast as possible, to make them unavailable, aesthetically, to a low art market...[The art establishment] extends its parameters to capture the new thing and elevate it from low art to high art—successfully enough to increase the commerce proposition that goes along with it—and to consign the idea of art to a particular world.

Magic and art arise from an egomaniac's insistence that the artist is right, and the universe wrong.

loss of faith helps explain the pervasive anomie, the feeling of aimlessness, meaninglessness, and sometimes even despair that shaped so much literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship in the twentieth century.

La chiesa ha trasformato la corruzione in una forma d'arte basata sulla pura avidità.

There is a danger in exposing yourself to too much vapid art. It can weaken your judgment and erode your sensibilities, until the time comes when you see things that are merely passable, and somehow think that they're good.

the wisest writers, those who become most popular, learn to draw upon art and literature in order to create works that speak to audiences more strongly, more deeply, and appeal to a wider network of readers.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.