Quotes About Art

It's the imperfections that make things beautiful

as anyone who's ever scrapbooked knows, Rome wasn't built in a day. You could spend a year or more working on one scrapbook.

I've got my Motown girl-group music playing, and my supplies are laid out all around me in a semicircle. My heart hole punch, pages and pages of scrapbook paper, pictures I've cut out of magazines, glue gun, my tape dispenser with all my different colored washi tapes. Souvenirs like the playbill from when we saw Wicked in New York, receipts, pictures. Ribbon, buttons, stickers, charms. A good scrapbook has texture. It's thick and chunky and doesn't close all the way.

Son las imperfecciones las que hacen las cosas hermosas.

but as anyone who's ever scrapbooked knows, Rome wasn't built in a day. You could spend a year or more working on one scrapbook.

Jenny Offill gets at this idea in a passage from her novel Dept. of Speculation—a passage much shared among the female writers and artists of my acquaintance: "My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

Il mio piano era non sposarmi mai. No, io volevo diventare un mostro d'arte. Le donne non diventano mai mostri d'arte, perché i veri mostri d'arte si preoccupano solo d'arte e mai di cose terrene. Nabokov non si chiudeva nemmeno l'ombrello, era Vera che gli leccava i francobolli.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.

Mark Twain fell in love with his wife after he saw her picture painted on an ivory miniature the size of a fingernail.

Darwin theorized that there was something left over after sexual attractiveness had served its purpose and compelled us to mate. This he called 'beauty' and thought it might be what drives the human animal to make art.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.

What Rilke said: Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

The bona fide artist must be governed as little as possible by law-governed nature, the material encountered. This can lead to attempts to escape, or direct attention away from, all things concrete and finite, but much commoner in modernity has been a conception of the artist as one who masters and controls, bends the material to predetermined purposes.

In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.

Music has its own distinctive contribution to make to theology precisely because it is a distinctive human practice.

Art reminds us that in fact the world always exceeds our grasp and perception.

For all its interconnectedness, music is marked by a unique and irreducible integrity, its own way of working.

Could not the art of dance, at its best, be read as gesturing toward the resurrection of the body celebrated in 1 Corinthians 15, a fully physical body certainly, but a body whose life vastly surpasses that of the body of this life ... the body riven by sin and running toward death?

Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement was much interested in energy and its various transformations.

The Italians are responsible for Fiat, Ferrari, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, De Tomaso, Lamborghini, Maserati and Pagani. It wouldn't seem so unfair if they weren't also really good at food, art and fashion. Selfish. That's what it is, it's selfish.

The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it, and what always frames it is discourse.

The art of interpreting the scriptures is the only one of which all men everywhere claim to be masters.

A poem should not mean/ but be.