Quotes About Art

Humanism was not a loss of confidence either in art or in art's capacity to exceed historical scholarship. For Panofsky humanism meant dedication to a balanced ideal of human nature. As such, it was a formal concept. Humanism sees asymmetries and imbalances in human nature as deformations. Humanism is the form classicism takes after the discrediting of the Idea.

Art is innovation, and its history cannot be written except from a distance sufficiently great to perceive form and form-ratio. One might answer that art today is still an incessant violation of codes. But how are those violations legible if no one code ever settles into common use, that is, starts to behave like a language or another convention-based system for getting things done; like a style, in other words? There can be no artistic innovation unless someone else is not innovating.

It was the doomed competition with photography that had led painting to lose its ways in the mindless transcription of reality. Admittedly the scorn for realism had been a traditional theme of premodern art theory, often mapped onto onto a geographic distinction. The direct imitation of reality was the northern European weakness, a limitation to be countered by an idealism cultivated in the Mediterranean realm.

Art is the direct confrontation between an irreducible individual soul, unreachable by society, and the facts of nature and human nature. The critic, not the connoisseur, reconstructs this confrontation.

History is not a conversation with the past, Instead, in Warburg, memory is carried forward to us, objectively, by the sequence of pathos-formulas. We do not choose our past, it chooses us. This was not an entirely direful story. The pathos-formulas register danger but they also ward it off, apotropaically. Art creates the psychic distance that gives mankind a chance in its struggle with hostile nature or with the gods.

I make movies that nobody will see. I've made movies that even I have never seen.

As the conductor Leopold Stokowski once famously said, "…a painter paints pictures on canvas, but musicians paint their pictures on silence.

Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity.

He lowered his gaze from the blue-and-green canvas of the earth to the beautiful masterpiece God had created and had called Sydney Carlyle.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.

Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.

In life you can be dealt a winning hand of cards and you can find a way to lose, and you can be dealt a losing hand and find a way to win. True in art and true in life: you pretty much make your own destiny. If you are by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a better position to be lucky in life.

The whole essence of good drawing - and of good thinking, perhaps - is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have it believable for what it is meant to be.

Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.

You've got a million bad drawings in you; you better get started.

All of you have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.

Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Creativity needs time. We're all dying. Fuck stagnation. High-five creation.

I think it's really cool to embrace the pain of something that may have hurt you and be able to express it through music.

I am reminded, now, of Leonardo's advice to painters: You should fix your eyes, he says, on certain walls stained with damp. You will see in these the likenesses of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, extensive plains; and you will see there battles and strange figures engaged in violent actions. For in such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of church bells, in whose reverberations you may find every word imaginable.