Quotes About Art

The age is mad and talks nonsense in all areas, but above all where art is concerned, because of the heretical confusion between good and beauty. Everyone who seeks the pure ideal where art is concerned is regarded as a heretic in the eyes of the Muse and of art. So I'll speak of the idealist painters as if they were ill; sometimes they reveal genius, but it is a genius that is ailing.

An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty -- a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.

Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

I feel funny about owning art. I don't really want to say: 'Wow, come and see my Monet - it's in a dark room at the bottom of my cellar.'

I've tried to make 'Strictly Ballroom' impossible to date. It does feel a bit '80s but I consciously made sure there was no technology in the movie that could date it.

My gift is my song

But there are also those who are in the category that I hope stories like La Boheme can help with, and they say, "It was beautiful, it was extraordinary, it was exquisite, it was naïve, and it was perfect. But it could only be for a certain amount of time.

His style was the exact opposite of his technical work; his line was loose, economical, free. And he wanted to capture what he couldn't keep, the fleeting, the transient.

This is what she really thought of him; he was an engineer, not an artist. And yet, there was art in his work, in the soar of a structure and the arch of a bridge, in every framework of light and air and iron.

Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

I can't imagine anyone approaching art without the joy of experimentation. The joy of it is inherent... and that is how you flow with the reality of change.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

Music, reality shows, acting, all of them are ways to express my feelings. So I will continue to try to do my best in all those categories.

Reality shows take up so much programming. They take up slots from scripted shows that could be about something.

Whenever education budgets get tightened, art programs are the first to get cut. Like the enduring popularity of reality TV, this never ceases to amaze me.

I love reality TV and everything, and it's something that I truly love to do, and I love the outcome of it; it's like my art. I consider my reality show as my art piece, and it's like a sculpture that I built; it's my baby.

When I found film, it was like, 'Of course!' It was this very intense realization that this is perhaps the most powerful, honed context that I've found.

The public needs art - and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize that the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for a few and ignore the masses.