Quotes About Art

Nothing is more complex than simplification; what art takes from enigma it more than replenishes in the instantiation of itself, in the labyrinthine puzzle it plants in history. The intensification of enigma. The luxuriantly problematic loam of existence is built out of the sedimented aeons of residues deposited by the will to power, the impulse to create.

A story isn't like a smoothly running engine, but is rather like a photograph. Photos can never be a perfect representation of what an eye looking at the same subject will see, partially due to the limitations of lenses and emulsions, but largely due to the conscious choice of the photographer.

What Lovecraft did do, better than anyone, was radically decenter the human experience from the art of fiction.

You can forget Proust and those stupid cakes. Beatles' songs are more potent.

There is no truth. Life is just a series of coincidences, accidents and random urges which we carefully forge – for our own, sick reasons – into a convenient design. Everything is arbitrary. Only art exists to make the arbitrary congeal. Not memory or God or love, even. Only art. The truth is simply an idea, a structure which we employ – in very small doses – to render life bearable. It's just a convenient mechanism.

She wondered why modern creations became uglier faster.

Aud rhymes with cowed.

I've heard horror stories of Old Masters wrapped in newspapers and arriving with ghastly copes of the funnies imprinted on a stately old forehead.

Aud rhymes with shroud.

The first thing that caught her eye was one of J.C. Dahl's huge paintings of fjord light and water. She stood before it and her restlessness dropped away. She became as still as the deep dark of the fjord. I know if I put my hands on her shoulders, they would be soft and relaxed. This was a Julia I had not seen before: distant, analytical, expert.

What do I want to do with drawing? I want to draw Wonder Woman every day. That was the moment. It changed everything.

Precision in philosophy is a false elegance. On the other hand, literary precision is the foundation of aesthetic achievement.

Todo necesita justificar su existencia, salvo la obra de arte.

El gran arte literario está en presentar con plenitud plástica lo inefable.

The history of art is the history of its materials, its techniques, its themes, its social conditions, its psychological motives, or its set of intellectual problems, but never the history of beauty. A value has no history.

Die moderne Literatur: dieses kolossale reaktionäre Unterfangen.

Modern literature: this colossal reactionary enterprise.

So wie es keine Tragödie gibt außer unter Fürsten und unter Götter, so gibt es keine Architektur außer für Götter und für Fürsten. Die moderne Architektur ist ein bürgerliches Melodrama.

Apologetics should mix skepticism and poetry. Skepticism to strangle idols, poetry to seduce souls.

Philosophy is the art of lucidly formulating problems. Inventing solutions is not an occupation of serious intellects.

It is possible to inculcate in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of progress and to sell him any grotesque object in the name of art.

The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.

Il n'est point de serpent, ni de monstre odieux, Qui, par l'art imité, ne puisse plaire aux yeux ; D'un pinceau délicat l'artifice agréable Du plus affreux objet fait un objet aimable. Ainsi, pour nous charmer, la Tragédie en pleurs D'Œdipe tout sanglant fit parler les douleurs, D'Oreste parricide exprima les alarmes, Et, pour nous divertir, nous arracha des larmes.

Art, likewise, is no longer seeking to represent utopias; rather, it is attempting to construct concrete spaces.