Quotes About Art

As Eibach and colleagues point out, almost every generation believes that art and music and the work ethic and you name it are not as good now as they used to be, the moral climate has deteriorated, children are more spoiled now than they were twenty years ago, there is more crime, et cetera,

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

As Parmigianino did it, the right handBigger than the head, thrust at the viewerAnd swerving easily away, as though to protectWhat it advertises.

Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, but I've always felt that music aspires to the condition of words.

It's important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

I am often asked why I write, and I don't know really—I just like it." —John Ashbery

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Opium had artistic significance, you know. Picasso smoked. He said the scent of opium was the least stupid smell in the world, except for that of the sea.

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this — as in other ways — they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting "Vanity", thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn't the truth either. It's more like a fleeting, subjective impression.