Quotes About Art

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician -- make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor -- make good art. IRS on your trail -- make good art. Cat exploded -- make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before -- make good art.

The only thing I collect is art. I collect it because I like looking at it. A lot of it is really personal stuff that my friends have made, paintings that my husband's mother made, and things that I bought. I buy abstract art on eBay, and I buy some outsider art on eBay, or what is called folk art, I buy a lot of. I have a lot of professional art work as well as more stuff my friends' kids make. To have a wall of art to look at, I feel really surrounded by love, because so much of the work is related to my friendships.

Art history is fine. I mean, that's a discipline. Art history is art history, and you start from the beginning and you end up in artist in time. But art is a little bit different. Art is a conversation. And if there's no conversation, what the hell is it about?

I was a very sickly kid. While I was in the hospital at age seven, my Dad brought me a stack of comic books to keep me occupied. And I was hooked. When my eighth grade art teacher, Mr. Smedley, told me he thought I had actual art talent, I decided to devote all my efforts in that direction in the hope that I might someday get into the comics biz. I became an art major, took every art class my school had to offer. In college, I majored in Advertising Art and Design.

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)

I believe Picasso's success is just one small part of the broader modern phenomenon of artists themselves rejecting serious art- perhaps partly because serious art takes so much time and energy and talent to produce-in favor of what I call `impulse art': art work that is quick and easy, at least by comparison.

When you talk about state of the art, that doesn't mean a damn thing. Think about it. State of the art. "This is the state of the art brush from Winsor-Newton." Yeah, but the state of the art sucks rubber donkey lungs.

There is no separate art of life. If you know how to allow poetry, if you know how to allow dance, if you know how to allow love - if you know how to ALLOW, then you know the art of life. In the allowing, in the let-go, in the surrender, is the art of life. How not to be and to let God be - that is the only art of life.

Jonathan Meese is not interested in the history of reality. Everything radical and precisely graphic is sustainable. Human ideologies like religions and politics are based on the past and therefore irrelevant to art. Art always transforms radicalism of the past into the future. Art is always the total time machine. Jonathan Meese is interested in the history of the future. Art is never nostalgic.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

I went to art school for fine art and then I started doing performance art, and then I started making fun of performance art, and it turned into comedy.

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

Art Is a Way Out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the débris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.

I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.

By and large, the making of serious, thoughtful and occasionally valuable art has become a lonely persuasion, while the marketing of art has become a boutique operation, manipulated by fashion, self-serving art scholars and the vagaries of the auction block.

I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.

The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation - a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion - that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change. To many, the solution seems simple enough: such a change being impossible, the art of the novel is dying.

Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.

There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic.

Drawing the kind of comics that I do takes so long that to specifically address something as transitory as a political matter in it would be about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot. On top of that, I personally don't think that my version of art is the best way to deal with political issues at all, or, more specifically, the place to make a point. Not that art can't, but it's the rare art that still creates something lasting if its main aim was purely to change a particular unfair social structure.

If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.

Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.

I do preach the idea of individualism as in not adapting any kind of style or model other than that one of your own. I always found it strange in art history when studying about the different guilds and movements. It sounded too contrived and having to follow devised parameters to create art. I personally am not a team player in that manner. The art should be labeled by the artist's name only.

I should think that many of our poets, the honest ones, will confess to having no manifesto. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own powers without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being... Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.

What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself.

Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art; it never treats its product as art.

I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.

Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

I think what happened in the last 10 or 15 years in the art market is that all the players - and that includes artists, dealers, art advisors, everyone - basically became dealers. We've had old-school collectors morph into speculators, flipping works. We've seen auction houses buying works directly from artists or from sleazy middlemen. The last step before the crash was the artists themselves supplying the auction houses. Dealing themselves, you know? The art world is as unregulated as any financial market there is.

My mother's a genius. She just kept feeding me art on whatever we had; paper plates, silver platter, didn't matter. You know, she just kept feeding it to me. So we went to see all kinds of theater. We would go to the art museum pretty much every Sunday, and I would watch her. She let me know that art was supposed to touch.

I think it's more, at least at the time, a sense of abstraction. My mind doesn't really work in a way where there's a definitive sense of something. I go one way and then it opens up into a million different ideas, and somehow, when you look at the art, Buddhist art, or particularly Tibetan art, you know, it's a similar thing. All of a sudden there are a million lotus leaves and you're following one to the next and to another, and I related to that, and it felt simple and easy to me. And it made me feel smart.

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

I have a lot left inside. I believe my art will last 500 years, 1,000 years and forever. For me, art is everything. I will strive to create works of art until I die, in the hope that my work will continue to touch the hearts of people even after I have died.

Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.

The art of cartooning is vulgarity. The only reason for cartooning to exist is to be on the edge. If you only take apart what they allow you to take apart, you're Disney. Cartooning is a low-class, for-the-public art, just like graffiti art and rap music. Vulgar but believable, that's the line I kept walking.

We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.

I love Inuit art, and most anything you would find in a folk art museum, as well as children's art or children's book illustrators or illustrators in general - all the kinds of work that my paintings would draw comparisons to.

'By heaven, that thou art fair, is most infallible true, that thou art beauteous truth itself, that thou art lovely. More fairer than fair, beautiful than beauteous, truer than truth itself, have commiseration on thy heroical vassal.

For photography to be an art involves reformulating notions of art, rejecting both material and formal purism and also the separation of art from commerce as distinct semiotic practices that never interlock.

I really enjoyed Eddie Bracken. He told me a great story. He did The Odd Couple on Broadway, replacing Art Carney, and he said, "Art Carney did it for six months and I did it for three years, and I don't think anyone I've ever spoken to saw me. They all saw Art Carney."

The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.

Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?

To call a work of art Kitsch is to condemn it for being bad art. But there is a great deal of bad art that we do not condemn as Kitsch. To condemn something as Kitsch is to condemn it on moral grounds.