Quotes About Art

The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

Becka said that writing was almost the same as that—each letter was like a picture or a row of stitching, and it was also like a musical note; you just had to learn how to form the letters, and then how to attach them together

there are some things that do not fare well in high definition.

Don't interfere with false gods, you'll get the gold paint all over your hands.

But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.

The sky darkens from ultramarine to indigo. God bless the namers of oil paints and high-class women's underwear, Snowman thinks. Rose-Petal Pink, Crimson Lake, Sheer Mist, Burnt Umber, Ripe Plum, Indigo, Ultramarine – they're fantasies in themselves, such words and phrases. It's comforting to remember that Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language, and not only with language. Ingenious in every direction at once.

All those paintings of women, in art galleries, surprised at private moments. Nymph Sleeping. Susanna and the Elders. Woman bathing, one foot in a tin tub - Renoir, or was it Degas? both, both women plump. Diana and her maidens, a moment before they catch the hunter's prying eyes. Never any paintings called Man Washing Socks in Sink.)

people believed, then, that Culture could make you better – a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house.

It was a wicked game. "Homer," says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. "The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.

Female artists are biologically confused, said Crake.

This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem. —

Jon smashes things, and glues the shards into place in the pattern of breakage. I can see the appeal.

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. Snowman longs to question them—who first had the idea of making a reasonable facsimile of him, of Snowman, out of a jar lid and a mop? But that will have to wait.

Writing poetry is a state of free float

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.

Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement.

My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a 'made' thing. Not something born.

Poems are made of words. They aren't boxes. They aren't houses. Nobody is in them, really.

What were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment?

It's theatre, Felix protests now, in his head. The art of true illusions! Of course it deals in traumatic situations! It conjures up demons in order to exorcise them! Haven't you read the Greeks? Does the word catharsis mean anything to you?

I don't sing like this often. It makes my throat hurt.

What he couldn't have in life he might still catch sight of through his art: just a glimpse, from the corner of his eye

He held a knife against her breast, As into his arms she pressed, sang the girl. I could just leave, thought Richard. But he didn't want to do that. Oh Willy Willy, don't you murder me, I'm not prepared for eternity. Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.