Quotes About Art

Since Gothic days all great art, with the exception of a few short-lived classicist movements, has something fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incompleteness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to utter the last word. There is always something left over for the spectator or reader to complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words— a feeling which we may say was never experienced by man before Gothic times.

For the artists the humanists were the guarantors of their intellectual status, and the humanists themselves recognized the value of art as a mean of propaganda for the ideas on which their own intellectual supremacy is based.

But the exponents of the theory "art for art's sake" maintain that any reference to actualities beyond the work of art must irretrievably destroy its aesthetic illusion. That may be correct, and yet this aesthetic illusion is not all, to produce it is not the exclusive or the most important aim of the artistic endeavor.

Tradition is here nothing but a bulwark against the all too violently approaching storms of unfamiliar, an element which is felt to be a principle of life but also of destruction. It is impossible to understand mannerism if one does not grasp the fact that its imitation of classical models is an escape from the threatening chaos, and that the subjective over-straining of its forms is the expression of the fear that form might fail the struggle with life and art fade into soul-less beauty.

If we do not know or even want to know the aims that the artist was pursuing through his work – his aim to inform, to convince, to influence people – then we do not get much farther in understanding his art than the ignorant spectator who judges a football game simply by the beauty of the players' movement.

In interpreting a work of art, we draw upon our own aims and endeavors, inform it with a meaning that has its origin in our own ways of life and thought. In a word, any art that really affects us becomes to that extent modern art.

In fact, the age of the Tyrants is the scene of a religious renaissance which on all sides throws up new ecstatic confessions of faith, new secret cults and new sects; but at first these develop underground and do not as yet reach the light of art. Thus we no longer find art being commissioned and stimulated by religion, but, on the contrary, we find in this period religious zeal being inspired by the increased skill of the artist.

Absolute parallelism of stylistic approach in the different arts and genres presupposes a level of development on which art no longer has to wrestle for the means of expression, but is able, to a certain extent, to choose freely among the different possibilities of formal treatment.

The most inexplicable paradox of the work of art is that it seems to exist for itself and yet not for itself; that it addresses itself to a concrete, historically and sociologically conditioned public, but seems, at the same time, to want to have no knowledge at all of a public.

But if Cravaggio really is the first master of modern age to be slighted by reason of his artistic worth, then the baroque signifies an important turning point in the relationship between art and the public - namely, the end of the "aesthetic culture" which begins with the Renaissance and the beginning of the more rigid distinction between content and form in which formal perfection no longer serves as excuses for any ideological lapse.

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

The expression "atonal music" is most unfortunate—it is on a par with calling flying "the art of not falling," or swimming "the art of not drowning."

Art is the desperate cry of those who experience in themselves the fate of humanity.

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

Sometimes being spontaneous and jumping on an opportunity is the only way you can see art being made.

Arnold Weinstein

Het effect van de schoonheid was geen genot, geen begeestering, geen verzoening met het leven, maar pijn. Kramp.

Sometimes it's impossible to say certain things ... Writing is something needed by man to share experience.

Football is an art, like dancing is an art - but only when it's well done does it become an art.

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes....Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.

We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing. Our knowledge allows us to make use of all the forces already in existence, our art to interpret emotions already felt. One big war, an epidemic, and we collapse into ignorance and darkness, fit sons of chimpanzees.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

There's nothing more interesting than painting women, it's the greatest subject that can be.

Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.