Quotes About Art

Beauty is where you find it.

I get strength from my art - all the paintings I own are powerful.

Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art.

I don't see that many movies lately that are actually about something, that are trying to challenge something about the way that people interact.

psychoanalysis gets interesting when it shifts the focus from making us more intelligible to ourselves to helping us become more curious about how strange we really are. And so, I would argue, does art.

So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces (139).

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate on them well," wrote Emerson. Is it true? If so, who can bear to believe it?

The problem is, of course, that art typically requires an audience, which loops us right back to the problem of observing actions and losing ourselves in consideration of their imagined form.

So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces.

I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.

Whereas an art that affects you in the moment, but which you then find hard to remember, is straining to bring you to another level. It offers images or ideas from that other level, that other way of being, which is why you find them hard to remember. But it has opened you to the possibility of growing into what you are not yet, which is exactly what art should do.

97. And now, I think, we can say: a glass bead may flush the world with color, but it alone makes no necklace. I wanted the necklace.

The reparative turn, as applied to art, is in many ways a continuation of the orthopedic aesthetic, with the difference being that the twentieth-century model imagined the audience as numb, constricted, and in need of being awakened and freed (hence, an aesthetics of shock), whereas the twenty-first-century model presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection (hence, an aesthetics of care).

And now, I think, we can say: a glass bead may flush the world with colour, but it alone makes no necklace. I wanted the necklace.

For Mallarmé, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird's folded wing, or a fan never opened.

Joan Mitchell—abstract painter

Les Bluets, which she painted in 1973

May I keep this?" It was not a question. He was already turning away, placing her miniature painting inside his leather book and tying the straps, so that the bird could never fly away again, even if it had lived.

Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas.

A poet need not trouble himself if he lies. He lies only in the matter of love, as the regions of the heart are open to tempting conquest.

Don't say that poetry, my friend, is beautiful or powerful for there is no powerful or beautiful poetry There is poetry that strikes you, secretly with the diseases of writing and schizophrenia, and you rave and your self leaves you for another

Letters are restless, hungry for an image, and the image is thirsty for a meaning.

I hate Tolkien. I mean. Bloody pretentious escapist nonsense, isn't it?

The real reality is there, but everything you KNOW about "it" is in your mind and your to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST