Quotes About Art

Sometimes men envisioned a feminine muse who inspired them to poetry, literature, art, or refined sensibility. Women, by contrast, often imagined the soul as a masculine presence that provided wisdom and strength.

When one has grown strong and wise enough, the warring elements which cost so much suffering and anxiety, will become complementary elements and produce the great work of art which is your own life.

The only alternative to torture is art" George Bernard Shaw. This means we will engage in our creativity or have to face its alternative brutality.

Finally, it is the inescapable tension between human freedom and divine historical plan that is brought forth so luminously through the pervasive repetitions of the Bible's narrative art.

If I am so fortunate as to be listening to the Hammerklavier sonata, the only correct answer, if you ask me suddenly, Who are you? would be to hum the Hammerklavier.

Van Gogh could see 28 shades of black. Why?

Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters and poets.

Malraux invented the term and concept of the "museum without walls," which sees modern art as developing, not from previous Western traditions alone, but from African, Hindu, Chinese and various other Third World traditions also. I consider him the godfather of multi-culturalism.

REALITY-TUNNEL: An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism.

To quote Gurdjieff again, Life is real then only when I am. If normal (mechanical) consciousness consists largely of uncritical inferences, projections, glandular-emotional reactions etc. then what it perceives, in art or in life, will have many traits of dream, will it not? If consciousness is intentional (Husserl), then making an effort to perceive will make both oneself and the surround more vivid, more meaningful, more real, perhaps?

If we consider Clifford Irving's Fake! a fake itself — a fake biography of a fake painter, revealing only what the faker, or fakers, care to reveal, and dumping a great deal of disinformation on us in the process — then we must regard Orson Welles' F For Fake as a fake movie about a fake biography of a fake painter. But perhaps we would more accurately dub it a fake documentary about the impossibility of ever making a "true" documentary.

Thus, radical psychologists ask us: does not the reality of schizophrenia or art remain real to those in schizophrenic or artistic states, however senseless these states appear to the non-schizophrenic or non-artistic? Anthropologists even ask: do not the emic realities of other cultures remain existentially real to those living in those cultures, however bizarre they may seem to the Geriatric White Male hierarchy that defines official reality in our culture?

No matter," said Pablo with the dignity of a great magician. "I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe.

Everybody who has examined the UMMO documents without accepting them as extraterrestrial seems to think some committee devised them. Curiously, when the first Elmyr fakes came to light, most art Experts assumed a committee had done them . . .)

Moral: Hang on to your Elmyrs, folks. They, too, may become Historical Curiosities. And remember: a counterfeit dollar, hung in a museum as found art by Andy Warhol, will have a value in the hundreds of thousands, whereas a "real" dollar, blessed by the Wizards in the Federal Reserve, will retain its meager face value until inflation reduces it even further.

Whether we like it or not, many of our pop artists today play post-modernist games with their audiences.

The great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, once wrote an essay claiming the camera is a liar. What did he mean by that? An old Zen Buddhist riddle asks Who is the Master who makes the grass green?

Besides, I cannot imagine a first-rate artist or scientist who could possibly qualify as Politically Correct, since P.C., like all dogma, creates an information-impoverished environment and art and science always seek information enrichment.

It is not impossible, however uncongenial the thought may be to the Citadel, that many unscientific reality-tunnels, explored by, say, painters, or poets, or musicians, or novelists, or mystics, may be not non-existent but merely not-tuned-in by those who have not practiced for many years in tuning-in painterly or poetic or musical or novelistic or mystical brain circuits.

To state our major thesis again in different words, Uncertainty, Indeterminacy and Relativity appear in modern science for the same reason they appear in modern logic, modern art, modern literature, modern philosophy and even modern theology. In this century, the human nervous system has discovered its own creativity, and its own limitations.

Would you regard it as a monstrous satirical exaggeration on my part or a mere statement of anthropological fact, if I assert that art criticism is the only place in the modern world, outside the Vatican, where medieval metaphysics (the Aristotelian absolute is) still flourishes?

that called itself the jazz sound, but

It is the glory and good of Art That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth - to mouths like mine, at least.

My whole life long I learn'd to love, This hour my utmost art I prove. And speak my passion—— heaven or hell? She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!