Quotes About Art

WRITER Actors come and go, pal—you guys are the furniture, okay? What I write is the house. Let's not get all precious about it . . .

The keystone of any artistic construction is contained in that simple question, what is the intention?

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

Sketchbooks and journals are the street lamps that illuminate the artist's journey.

The thing about my music is, there really is no point.

Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.

It is not my purpose here to document the destruction caused by war [...] The point is to ask ourselves why these accounts have not had greater effect. [...] Why is it that many of us are deeply moved by visual art, fiction, and firsthand accounts of destruction and yet accept war as a means of resolving conflict or defending ourselves?

In the second place, the term "Caucasian" as a designation for white people originates in concepts of beauty related to the white slave trade from eastern Europe, and whiteness remains embedded in visions of beauty found in art history and popular culture.

I could not abandon the rest of me, even when the rest of me overwhelmed my art.

The alarming history of European marble "cleaning" includes a chapter on this statuary describing a drive to make ancient Greek art white nearly destroyed the art itself. In the 1930s workers in the British Museum were directed to remove the dark patina with metal tools on the mistaken assumption that their proper color should be white. Such a "cleaning" seriously damaged the Parthenon marbles, prompting an inquiry by the museum's standing committee that halted the work.

In my history books I have already had my say in clear language and discursive meaning about community. Now what history means to me in images is freedom from coherence, clarity, and collective representation. My images carry their own visual meaning, which may or may not explicate history usefully or unequivocally. For me now, image works as particularity, not as generalization. That is how art school changed my thinking about history and how visual art set me free.

I don't make a film to make people like it. I make a film to make people think

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser.

I continued, "The painting shows this fish with a big eye and a halo, floating in air, and underneath the fish are all these Native Americans having sex." "What? What does that have to do with Custer's Last Stand?" "Well, the painting is titled, Holy Mackerel, Look at All Those Fucking Indians.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

We make versions, and true versions make worlds.

To make a faithful picture, come as close as possible to copying the object as it is.' This simple-minded injunction baffles me; for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool and much more. If none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might? If all are ways the object is, then none is way the object is. I cannot copy all these at once; and the more nearly I succeeded, the less would the result be a realistic picture.

Africa's rock art is the common heritage of all Africans, but it is more than that. It is the common heritage of humanity.

Man was the animal who created. Like the God in whose image he was supposedly made, he created his own heaven and his own hell.

The drama of life is a psychological one and the whole of it is written and produced by your assumptions. Learn the art of assumption, for only in this way can you create your own happiness.

There ought to be some other means of reckoning quality in this the best and loveliest of games; the scoreboard is an ass.

Prayer—the art of believing what is denied by the senses—deals almost entirely with the subconscious. Through prayer, the subconscious is suggested into acceptance of the wish fulfilled, and, reasoning deductively, logically unfolds it to its legitimate end.

When a man learns the art of thinking from the end, that man is master of his fate. For he defines his end, he formulates an aim in life, and then feels himself right into the situation of that end.