Quotes About Art

Rectification Campaign, that Mao engineered in Yenan and that was designed both to indoctrinate the thousands who had flocked to Yenan and to eradicate his opponents inside the party. The long-range effect of this famous meeting was to reduce the magnificent art and culture of China, historically one of the greatest contributions to global culture ever made, to standardized, officially approved propaganda.

The creation of an authentic work of art, the creation of an authentic life - they are one and the same.

Simon's interest and love for life comes from arts, from music, books, his collection of paintings and beautiful cars. My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.

Michelangelo had said that the successful completion of a great mosaic must rest upon the infinite design in the placement of a single tile.

He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again. To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world's greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.

The development of an image of the glowing human being can be traced in European art. One index of it is the means for representing haloes. In medieval art, these are gold, very material, silhouetting the head; since the Renaissance, they have seemed to radiate from the head, in turn suffusing it with a glow. Rudolph

Within Western art the dead white body has often been a sight of veneration, an object of beauty. While Christ on the cross may often be an image of agony, it is also one of beauty, with the suffering itself part of the transcendent beauty. In

The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.

Pornography is supposed to arouse sexual desires. If pornography is a crime, when will they arrest makers of perfume?

If you are a scientist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist, or musician, or if your creativity is a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law, or some other profession, you are a member.

There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate.

Attempt to be creative for the joy it brings . . . select something like music, dance, sculpture, or poetry. Being creative will help you enjoy life. It engenders a spirit of gratitude.

A friend came over to the house a few days ago and read one of my poems. He came back today and asked to read the same poem over again. After he finished reading it, he said, "It makes me want to write poetry."

It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.

the book takes rank with those books which are bits of life rather than products of art.

Photography wasn't even considered part of the art world until fairly recently. I find it ironic that some people in the world of fine-art photography consider digital photography as somehow "less artistic," when it is merely a change in process, not vision. The debates will always be there, but your vision is yours alone.

Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.

We are made for art . . . The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They'd spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.

Art is not a mobocracy. It's a republic.

But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.