Quotes About Art

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

We often hear it said that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible: it is contrary which must be said (with no intention of paradox): the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world's language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passion, another speech, an exact speech.

A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.

In terms of image-repertoire, the Photographer (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.

The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.

But very often (too often, to my taste) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of posing. I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (...).

photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an 'ineffable' society...

Aussi, le style est-il toujours un secret[...]

Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive , when it thinks.

As proffering, I love you is on the side of expenditure. Those who seek the proffering of the word (lyric poets, liars, wanderers) are subjects of expenditure; they spend the word as if it were impertinent (base) that it be recovered somewhere; they are at the extreme limit of language, where language itself...recognizes that it is without backup or guarantee, working without a net

One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring.

La sanción del crítico no es el sentido de la obra, sino el sentido de lo que dice sobre ella.

Obliger a penser tout seul, voila une definition possible de la culture classique. Une civilisation n'est belle que dans la mesure ou il y a une circulation naturelle entre les oeuvres de ses grands hommes et la vie intime de ses individus et de ses foyers.

è sterile ricondurre l'opera a qualcosa di puramente esplicito, perché allora non c'è, immediatamente, più nulla da dirne e perché la funzione dell'opera non può consistere nel chiudere le labbra di coloro che la leggono

He dabbled in watercolors, attended the theater, and quoted liberally from Shakespeare and Dickens.

That bust I can never forget,' one young visitor remembered, 'for the old lady always paused before it in her tour of the rooms and, leaning on her cane, gazed and gazed, as if she could never be satisfied.

these affairs consumed less of Pierpont's time and interest than his true aphrodisiac—art collecting.

think she was also thinking, perhaps, of Justine, up there in the big house among the tall candles and the oil-paintings by forgotten masters.

En las reuniones sociales abundaban las charlas superficiales. La gente llenaba los museos y las salas de conciertos, pero no acudían allí para ver y oír, sino más bien impulsados por una desaforada y narcisista necesidad de ser vistos y oídos.

Deshaced ese verso, quitadle los caireles de la rima, el metro, la cadencia y hasta la idea misma. Aventad las palabras, y si queda algo todavía, eso será la poesía.

There were pictures on the walls, all of them dime-store prints of Jesus. In all of them Jesus had blue eyes and wore pale blue robes and had long blond hair and a neat blond beard. He looked more like a Malibu surfer than a Jew from two thousand years ago.

difference between intaglio and lithography?

Piet Mondrian was his favourite painter of all time, and this exact picture was his favourite work of all time. The title was Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue. Mondrian had painted the original in 1930 and Reacher had seen it in Zurich, Switzerland.