Quotes About Art

They really knew how to work this edge, the Dutch painters?ripeness sliding into rot. The fruit's perfect but it won't last, it's about to go. And see here especially," she said, reaching over my shoulder to trace the air with her finger, "this passage?the butterfly." The underwing was so powdery an delicate it looked as if the color would smear if she touched it. "How beautiful he plays it. Stillness with a tremble of movement.

loose tendons; dance world's loss; performance art's gain

Goyen there. Sadly not for sale." "Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot." "From here, yes, you might." He was pleased at the comparison. "Very similar painters—Vincent

Priceless. I rolled to face the wall. The recovered Rembrandt had been valued at forty million. But forty million was still a price.

La belleza es terror. Temblamos ante todo lo que llamamos bello.

Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century paintings. Rugs worn to threads, painted Japanese fans and antique valentines flickering in candlelight, Pierrots and doves and flowergarlanded hearts.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

He's so particilar, Rembrandt. Even his religious subjects — it's as if the saints came down to model for him in the life… You could pick him out of a line-up, couldn't you…? Goodness written all over him and yet always that twitch of worry and disquiet. That subtle shade of the betrayer

Una cosa era ver un cuadro en un museo, pero contemplarlo bajo todas esas luces, estados anímicos y estaciones diferentes era apreciarlo de mil formas distintas; guardarlo encerrado en la oscuridad —un objeto hecho de luz, que solo vivía en la luz— no estaba bien por muchas razones que no sabría explicar.

There's only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.

But for all foreseeable time to come- for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water- the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof of the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead:their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished at light at the heart of the world.

The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up.

Then on the opposite page a different ad, for digital cameras, scrawled in artsy letters and signed Joan Miró: You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And—I would argue as well—all love.

And isn't the whole point of things-beautiful things-that they connect you to some larger beauty

When I disagreed—strenuously—and asked what was wrong with focusing one's entire attention on only two things, if those two things were Art and Beauty, Laforgue replied: "There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.

the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods amd seasons was to see it a thousamd different ways

Why didn't vandals ever quote Shakespeare? I'd love to see graffiti in iambic pentameter.

Hundreds of places of worship exist today in which there is almost everything except the cross. There are carved oaks and sculptured stones; there are stained glass and brilliant paintings; there are solemn services and a constant round of ordinances, but the real cross of Christ is not there. Jesus crucified is not proclaimed in the pulpit. The Lamb of God is not lifted up, and salvation by faith in Him is not freely proclaimed. Therefore, all is wrong. Beware of such places of worship.

He adored Goya. The madness leapt off the walls.

Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour.

My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.

I hate married men ; they never make any sacrifice to the Arts, but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and families, or some rubbish of that sort .