Quotes About Art

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Not everyone is an artist but everyone is a fucking critic.

My idea was to chose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position. (On giving up art to play chess)

Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing

I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately (forms of) expression... for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my (art) against such contamination.

Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.

L'art est justifié dans la mesure où il ajoute à la vie juste ce qui lui manque pour être plus vraie qu'elle-même.

What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.

Never get a mime talking. He won't stop.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

Not only does one not retain all at once the truly rare works, but even within such works it is the least precious parts that one perceives first. Less deceptive than life, these great masterpieces do not give us their best at the beginning.

A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

one might almost say that works of literature are like artesian wells, the deeper the suffering, the higher they rise.)

a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

The idea of popular art, like that of a patriotic art, if not actually dangerous seemed to me ridiculous. If the intention was to make art accessible to the people by sacrificing refinements of form, on the ground that they are "all right for the idle rich" but not for anybody else, I had seen enough of fashionable society to know that it is there that one finds real illiteracy and not, let us say, among electricians.

An artist has no need to express his mind directly in his work for it to express the quality of that mind; it has indeed been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.