Quotes About Art

The greatness of poetry comes from its struggle to express the rapture of the soul in the contemplation of beauty.

To appreciate art, the observer must adopt a special attitude of mind; the same attitude required by Plato, of detachment from personal concerns, so that the work of art can be appreciated in contemplative fashion uncontaminated by personal needs or preoccupations.

Art was important to the pessimistic Schopenhauer because the aesthetic mode of knowing, the pure contemplation of beauty, the tranquil appreciation of the Ideas, enabled the individual to escape, for the time being, from the never-ending misery of unsatisfied desire into a Nirvana of spiritual peace.

However, it is not a direct evocation of those emotions within himself which moves the listener but rather the way in which a great composer transforms universal emotions into art.

Music is a temporal art. Its patterns exist in time and require duration for their development and completion. Although painting and architecture and sculpture make statements about relationships between space, objects, and colours, these relationships are static.

Stravinsky's ideal was to create works in which the personal dimension is eliminated, which is why Constant Lambert condemned his neoclassical work as inhuman and mechanical.

Wagner's music has the power to plumb new depths and uncover passions never before consciously experienced

Othello's suicide is profoundly moving; but it does not make us feel suicidal. What moves us is the way in which Shakespeare (and Verdi) made sense out of tragedy by making it part of an artistic whole. As Nietzsche realized, even tragedy is an affirmation of life.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

I always feel that art springs more from dirt than from fine intentions: given the choice, I put my trust in dirt.

Water has no taste, no color, no odor; it cannot be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself. It fills us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

And then there's the matter of the show. Did he promise her a show? Is this how the gallery works? Is this how he and my mom got together in the first place? How many women has he done this to? His eye, his eye, everybody's always talking about his eye. But is it an eye for art or for ass?

To artists, he was the lefty son of Klaus, a man who lived by his values, who knew hardship. To himself he was Francis Arsenault, his own invention, ex nihilo.

We've got a gallery here, in Chelsea. Plus London and Berlin. That's why I'm trying to get to Germany. For an opening.

The art is only the glue. It's not always just glue, obviously. Sometimes it's capital-A art. But for the most part, the work, from the perspective of the art world, exists to provide an occasion for buying and selling, for socializing, for crowing, for telegraphing taste, for cleaning up dirty money.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.

Sometimes people have the idea that art should be highly refined. But I always believed that one could make art out of simple, humble things. Small things can be transcendental. They can change our way of looking at the world. I think it's important to make art out of almost anything.

The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.

All Writing Is Garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. The whole literary scene is a pigpen, especially today.

The fixation of the theater in one language--written words, music, lights, noises--betokens its imminent ruin.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.