Art

From BillionQuotes

Quotations about Art organized alphabetically according to quote; See also music.

• "A community without artists is not a true community, only people living in the same vicinity." ~ Byrne Piven

• "Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you." ~ Jackson Pollock in Jackson Pollock (1967) by Francis V O'Connor

• "Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable" ~ Derek R. Audette

• "After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations." ~ David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day

• "All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography." ~ Federico Fellini, Atlantic (December 1965)

• "All art is solitary and the studio is a torture area." ~ Alexander Liberman, The New York Times (13 May 1979)

• "All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites." ~ Marc Chagall

• "Any great work of art ... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air." ~ Leonard Bernstein, "What Makes Opera Grand?" Vogue (December 1958)

• "Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes things visible." ~ Paul Klee

• "Art has got nothing to do with taste." ~ Max Ernst

• "Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John." ~ Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (Pantheon 1958)

• "Art is made by the alone for the alone." ~ Luis Barragán, Time (12 May 1980)

• "Art is spawned from the process that arises in the seeking of an expression", Daniel Blomqvist (4 May 2006)

• "Art is the signature of civilizations." ~ Beverly Sills, NBC TV (4 May 1985)

• "Art is the triumph over chaos." ~ John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever Knopf (1978)

• "Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world." ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

• "Art is what is irresistible." ~ William Saroyan as quoted by William Bolcolm in "The End of the Mannerist Century" (2004), The Pleasure of Modernist Music, Ashby, Arved, ed. ISBN 1580461433

• "Art means to dare—and to have been right." ~ Ned Rorem W magazine (10 October 1980)

• "Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere." ~ G. K. Chesterton

• "As an artist, English is my second language." ~ Anonymous

• "Buy old masters. They fetch a better price than old mistresses." ~ Max Aitken, recalled on his death (9 June 1964)

• "Creativity is the subtle theft of another's ideas." ~ Jim Oblak

• "Dead artists always bring out an older, richer crowd." ~ Elizabeth Shaw, On a fauvism exhibition that drew 2,000 people, The New York Times (26 March 1976)

• "[Discipline in art is] a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing." ~ Henry Moore, recalled on his death, (31 August 1986)

• "Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence." ~ Henri Matisse, Christian Science Monitor (25 March 1985)

• "Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad." ~ Salvador Dali, People (27 September 1976)

• "For a long time I limited myself to one color—as a form of discipline." ~ Pablo Picasso, On his blue and rose periods, Picasso on Art

• "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" ~ Michael Berens

• "Great authors should be read, and not met." ~ Will Cuppy

• "He searched disorder for its unifying principle." ~ Brian O'Doherty, On Stuart Davis, abstractionist whose work prefigured pop art, The New York Times (26 June 1964)

• "I do a bale of sketches, one eye, a piece of hair. A pound of observation, then an ounce of painting." ~ Gardner Cox on his portraits, Washington Post (31 May 1975)

• "I don't live in the present, I Am The Present" ~ Paul Palnik in Mystic Creativity (1996)

• "I don't paint nature, I am nature" ~ Jackson Pollock

• "I don't really have studios. I wander around—around people's attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me." ~ Andrew Wyeth, Time, 18 Aug 86

• "I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream." ~ Vincent van Gogh

• "I'd rather use art to climb than anything else." ~ Robert C Scull, When asked if his purchases were for investment or social climbing, recalled on his death (1 January 86)

• "If more than 5% of the people like a painting then burn it for it must be bad." ~ James McNeill Whistler

• if the subject of art
  will be a broken jug
  a small broken soul
  with a great self-pity
  what will remain of us
  will be like tears of lovers
  in a small dirty hotel
  when wallpapers dawn
  ~ Zbigniew Herbert in Why the Classics ~

• "If you want to know what true art is: Go outside on a clear night, wait until it gets very, very dark, then look up! You will see no rules of composition, no evidence of superior technique. Yet, you will be staring into the very face of pure, unadulterated beauty and wonder. That is the unattainable Ideal for which I must constantly strive." ~ Derek R. Audette

• "Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul." ~ Henri Matisse in Matisse (Rizzoli 1984)

• "In short, if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art." ~ Virginia Woolf in The Three Guineas

• "It holds up in one object or one surface, in one bright, luminous and concentrated thing—whether a beer can or a flag—all the dispersed elements that go to make up our lives." ~ Robert C Scull, On his collection of pop and minimal art, Time (21 February 1964)

• "It is not about which artist is more skilled than which other artist. It is about creating what is in you to create. A lack of confidence in oneself is like a thief, It steals from the world that which might be worthy." ~ Derek R. Audette

• "It is only after years of preparation that the young [artist] should touch color—not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression." ~ Henri Matisse, Christian Science Monitor (25 March 1985)

• "[It] is that rare impressionist painting where people don't judge the light, but rather are judged by it." ~ Alexandra Johnson, On Terrace at Sainte-Adresse by Claude Monet, Christian Science Monitor (1 October 1980)

• "[It was] like the wild child who belongs in a delinquent home." ~ Lowery Sims, On status of modern art collection before $26-million, 110,000-square-foot addition to the museum, Manhattan Inc. (August 1986)

• "Light is impressionism." ~ Gae Aulenti, On positioning galleries for impressionist and postimpressionist paintings at the top of her design for Paris's Musée d'Orsay, Time (8 December 1986)

• "Most artists are surrealists. ... always dreaming something and then they paint it." ~ Dong Kingman in Twenty-two Famous Painters and Illustrators Tell How They Work (1964) edited by Mary Ann Guitar

• "Most Christians' view of evangelism are along the same lines of the propaganda campaigns of Nazi Germany. They have this 'us against them' concept, and they destroy art. They want to make films and music that make their philosophical position look good, which is not the same as art." ~ Frank Hart, leader for Atomic Opera

• "Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask." ~ Robert Motherwell in The Times (17 November 1985)

• "No matter how much utter disdain I have for the work of a particular artist, I would still rather that he had created those works than hadn't" ~ Derek R. Audette

• "No matter how substandard you feel your skill or talent may be, If you never produce your art, the world will always remain deprived of it." ~ Derek R. Audette

• "Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable." ~ Leonard Baskin, Publishers Weekly (5 April 1965)

• "The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there.'" ~ Russell Lynes in Snobs (1950)

• "The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side. ... After a long period of gazing (during which he may occasionally squint his eyes), he will approach to within a few inches of the picture and examine the brushwork; he will then return to his former distant position, give the picture another glance and walk away." ~ Russell Lynes in Snobs (1950)

• "The entire 'my art is better than your art' thing really gets under my skin. The fact of the matter is: Your art IS better than my art... at being what it is. So what? It just so happens that my art is better than your art, at being what it is."~ Derek R. Audette

• "The function of all art ... is an extension of the function of the visual brain, to acquire knowledge; ...artists are, in a sense, neurologists who study the capacities of the visual brain with techniques that are unique to them." ~ Semir Zeki

• "The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by artists to prove that only a great artist can be a great technician. The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by technicians to prove that only a great technician can be a great artist." ~ Alex Gross, East Village Other (1968)

• "[The object of art is] to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment." ~ Tennessee Williams

• "The philosopher sought only to discover, the artist to perfect" ~ Winwood Reade

• "The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." ~ Glenn Gould

• "The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited." ~ William Saroyan, Recalled at his Broadway memorial service, The New York Times (31 Oct 83)

• "The studio, a room to which the artist consigns himself for life, is naturally important, not only as workplace, but as a source of inspiration. And it usually manages, one way or another, to turn up in his product." ~ Grace Glueck, The New York Times (29 June 1984)

• "The whole beauty and grandeur of Art consists ... in being able to get above all singular forms, particularities of every kind [by making out] an abstract idea ... more perfect than any one original." ~ John Constable

• "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall." ~ Cyril Connolly

• "This museum is a torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago." ~ Alfred Barr, Newsweek (1 June 1964)

• "Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealist." ~ Dong Kingman in Twenty-two Famous Painters and Illustrators Tell How They Work (1964)

• "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it immensely. All art is useless." ~ Oscar Wilde

• "Whats the diffence between art and pornography... a government grant!" ~ Peter Griffin, Family Guy

• "When the established members of academia start becoming vocal as to how poor your art is, then you know you're on to something." ~ Derek R. Audette

• "Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away." ~ Alberto Giacometti, On his choice of models, quoted by James Lord in Giacometti (1985)

• "Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse." ~ Winston Churchill, To Royal Academy of Arts, Time (11 May 1953)bg:Изкуство

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