Quotes About Art

From Lovelessness in relation to nature to advance to lovelessness in relation to art –a lovelessness so extreme that we have effectively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and set up various kinds of mass production by machines in their place.

Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument. The gorgeous fancy dress worn by kings, popes and their respective retainers, military and ecclesiastical, has a very practical purpose—to impress the lower classes with a lively sense of their masters' superhuman greatness.

From Lovelessness in relation to nature we to advance to lovelessness in relation to art –a lovelessness so extreme that we have effectively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and set up various kinds of mass production by machines in their place.

It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being.

As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine [techniques of propaganda] with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational [information] essential to the maintenance of individual liberty.

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

When burdened by the feeling that there are too many photographs in the world, I ask myself if there are too many flowers.

Do not imagine that art or anything else is other than high magic! - is a system of holy hieroglyph. The artist, the initiate, thus frames his mysteries. The rest of the world scoff, or seek to understand, or pretend to understand; some few obtain the truth.

Beauty is itself so unattainable that it escapes altogether; and the true artist, like the true Mystic, can never rest

the sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.

Her cheeks were bright with a soft vermilion of the pomegranate mingling with the whiteness of the lily.

La Naturaleza es más de la mitad del arte.

El arte no es cosa de experiencia; es cosa de imaginación. Javier de Maistre hacía viajes maravillosos alrededor de su cuarto; Beethoven era sordo; Milton cuando escribió el canto a la luz, estaba ciego.

Alessandro Baricco

A volte le parole non bastano. E allora servono i colori. E le forme. E le note. E le emozioni.

rimane l'ombra di un sapore che la costringe a pensare acqua di mare, quest'uomo dipinge il mare con il mare.

Chi avrebbe mai pagato per farsi smascherare da un pittore e per apprendere in casa quello che di se stesso si affannava a nascondere tutti i giorni?

Portraiture has its risks, and I suppose a dissident Free Presbyterian fatwa is one of them.

Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel.

Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your tracks, perhaps, but that was not the same thing; awe was something quite different

He agreed with David Hockney that an artist really had to be able to draw before anything else could be achieved.

We put on our walls what we think is beautiful or inspiring, and if others think that it is manufactured or shallow, then they need not have it on their walls.

he had said that he had used a camera obscura device to paint his pictures. It had seemed such an unlikely theory, and yet Hockney's explanation made it seem so feasible. It was all to do with angles and perspective, and when you came to look at a Vermeer, there was a definite photographic feel to the artist's work.

That is why the artist will always be happy—no matter how the world treats him. If he knows that what he creates is good, then he can bear the indifference of others.