Quotes About Art

If an artistic object represents the thing-itself perfectly, it is just another copy of that thing. The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others...

Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain.

on sad songs] In addition, the depressed person reasons, this person who went through what I went through lived through it; he recovered and can now talk about it. Moreover, the singer turned that experience into a beautiful work of art.

I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

And I've never viewed comics as assignments for the client.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us - viewer and maker - in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.

I don't intentionally make my films with the express goal of surprising the viewer.

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

When we make the show, we are always talking about how the show is really in between what we make and what the viewer thinks of it.

I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.

It's really easy to make a movie that five people understand. It's really hard to make something that a lot of people understand and yet is not obvious, still has subtlety and ambiguity, and leaves you with something to do as a viewer.

I feel my work is made for one being, one individual. You could say that's me, but that's not really true. It's for an idealized viewer.

My work has threads of ideas from all over the place. I try to crystallise them in something simple and direct that the viewer can then take where they want.

But I don't think of any particular viewer in mind other than myself.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

It's easy to make something avant garde. To do something in the traditional way is much more brave in the sense that you're - your technique is so much more exposed because there's not all this flashy stuff to distract the viewer.

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

In my opinion, the motion picture is the greatest medium of expression ever invented. It embraces all the other arts. The films that have the greatest unity, the greatest overall strength, and give the most satisfaction to the viewer, have been those in which a guiding hand was imposed in every section of the film's many divisions.

I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there's an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there's just this sense of expansion. Because that's where the art happens. Inside the viewer.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art.

I often concentrate on the eyes and lips, they are great indicators of mood and feeling, and I find that I can project character into my portraits by bringing the viewer's attention to these areas.

The real change that paintings undergo is in the perceptions of the viewer.