Quotes About Art

Everybody naked, nobody happy. It's Scandinavian art porn.

There was a difference between art, which you just looked at, and things like soap, which you used. Even if the soap smelled so good that you didn't want to use it, only smell it. This was why people got so pissed off about art. Because you didn't eat it, and you didn't sleep on it, and you couldn't put it up your nose. A lot of people said things like That's not art when whatever they were talking about could clearly not have been anything else, except art.

In the Arab world, every work of art has a tiny flaw, so that it doesn't sacrilegiously compete with the perfection of God.

Concision is the sister of talent.

para que esculpiera por anticipado piedras

An Outline of European Architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner.

If we're all aggressive, obedient solders [sic], who's going to write the poems and play the blues and go on anti-war protest marches?

Culture has very much to do with the human spirit. What we find beautiful or entertaining or moving is rooted in our spiritual life.

intrinsically vulgar, depraved, or morbid. That's as may be. "Using" is inferior to "reception" because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.7

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.

Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a visionary. It is a vague term. All artists, even the most realistic, start with some kind of vision - that is what leads them to select what they need from the infinite diversity of appearances.

At some time in the ninth century one could have looked down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked at today in the British Museum it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less agreeable – as menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.

Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.

Photography is the power of observation, not the application of technology.

To me, there's two kinds of music these days. There's ephemeral music, and there's music that has lasting power and depth.

It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer.

Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.

I believe that dance has the power to heal, mentally and physically.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

I think the power of image is in mystery - I endlessly create mysteries, by way of this dystopian message, to initiate intrigue.

Tis not always in a physician's power to cure the sick; at times the disease is stronger than trained art.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.

Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of.