Quotes About Art

Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.

This is the age of dramatic art, when men wonder at the big characters of old, as schoolboys at the words of Aeschylus, and try to find in their own breasts the roots of those monstrous, but artistically developed impersonations.

It's a terrible painting," said Della, backing away from it with distaste. "There's definitely something wrong with the mayonnaise," said Lucy. "It looks almost curdled, as if she added the oil too quickly." "I don't know anything about mayonnaise," said Della. "It's just a terrible painting. I don't blame Dr. Vanlandingham." "But I like the idea of it, said Roger. "A portrait of a sandwich.

Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.

Dance ... is life, or becomes it, in a way that other arts cannot attain. It is not in stone, or words or tones, but in our muscles. It is a formulation of their movements.

The dance is four-dimensional art in that it moves concretely in both space and time. For the onlooker, it is an art largely of visual space combined with time. But for the dancer, and this is more important, the dance is more a muscular than a visual space rhythm, a muscular time, a muscular movement and balance. Dancing is not animated sculpture, it is kinesthetic.

Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.

Science cannot go outside of the sphere of abstractions. In this respect it is infinitely inferior to art, which, in its turn, is peculiarly concerned also with general types and general situations, but which incarnates them by an artifice of its own in forms which, if they are not living in the sense of real life, none the less excite in our imagination the memory and sentiment of life.

I am not a man, but a cloud in trousers.

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell.... we can't dance synonyms.

The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.

It seems at first sight strange that any man of genius should have patiently submitted to rules which, from the point of view of art, were perfectly arbitrary.

Beauty is an ill-defined attribute of certain members of an ill-defined class; and for the class itself there is no very convenient name. We might describe its members as "objects of aesthetic interest" always bearing in mind that this description (as I use it) applies to objects of the most varying degrees of excellence—to the small as well as the great, the trifling as well as the sublime: to conjuring and dancing; to literature, art, and natural beauty.

Growth in Knowledge, like productiveness in Art, can hardly, so far as its direct consequences are concerned, do otherwise than subserve the cause of progress.

There is, even from my point of view, a great difference between beauty in art and beauty in nature. For, in the case of nature, there is no artist; while, as I observed just now, "a work of art requires an artist, not merely in the order of natural causation, but in the order of aesthetic necessity. It conveys a message which is valueless to the recipient unless it be understood by the sender.

The greatest works which the world has seen have not been dedicated to an unknown posterity, but have been produced to satisfy the daily needs of their age, and have, therefore, of necessity conformed to the tastes, and usually to the fashion and the prejudices, of the period which gave them birth.

Fashions have changed; tastes have altered. In music, not less than in poetry and painting, each generation desires to have, and insists on having, that which best suits its moods--which most effectually appeals to the special quality of its emotions: and this universal principle of change ... makes it necessary that the artistic productions of every age, be they better or be they worse, shall at least be different from those of the preceding one.

The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.

I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lost behind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycads and bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d'Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.

Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best for that we must have recourse to art.

According to the greater or lesser violence of your sensual passion, you have perhaps discerned some of those twenty-two pleasures which in other times created in Greece twenty-two kinds of courtesans, devoted especially to these delicate branches of the same art.

But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.

Music is at once a science and an art. It is rooted in physics and mathematics, hence it is a science; inspiration makes it an art, unconsciously utilizing the theorems of science. It is founded in physics by the very nature of the matter it works on. Sound is air in motion. The air is formed of constituents which, in us, no doubt, meet with analogous elements that respond to them, sympathize, and magnify them by the power of the mind.

Great artists are beings who, to quote Napoleon, can cut off at will the connection which Nature has put between the senses and thought.