Quotes About Art

To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.

Art thou in misery, brother? Then I pray Be comforted. Thy grief shall pass away. Art thou elated? Ah, be not too gay; Temper thy joy: this, too, shall pass away. Art thou in danger? Still let reason sway, And cling to hope: this, too, shall pass away. Tempted art thou? In all thine anguish lay One truth to heart: this, too, shall pass away. Do rays of loftier glory round thee play? Kinglike art thou? This, too, shall pass away! Whate'er thou art, wher'er thy footsteps stray, Heed these wise words: This, too, shall pass away.

Prayer is a fine, delicate instrument. To use it right is a great art, a holy art. There is perhaps no greater art than the art of prayer. Yet the least gifted, the uneducated and the poor can cultivate the holy art of prayer.

Art is frightening. Art isn't pretty. Art isn't painting. Art isn't something you hang on the wall. Art is what we do when we're truly alive. An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it (all of it, the work, the process, the feedback from those we seek to connect with) personally.

Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake", there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.

Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.

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.

The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory - disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness. If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

I love movies; I grew up loving movies. I've always loved movies. I never thought about making movies until I took art classes and then I started studying different artists. As you study paintings, you see light and shadow, of course - Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix. You start to understand the relationship between people and art, and images. For me, between movies that I watched and art, it was like, I'd love to make moving art. Moving pictures.

I write some art criticism, and one thing that's clear to me is that politics is fashionable in the American art world in a way it maybe isn't in American fiction. Your work of art becomes fashionable the moment it has some kind of political commentary. I think this has its dangers - the equation between fashion, politics, and art is problematic for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, the notion of politics as being de rigueur in the world of fiction is almost unthinkable. In fiction in America at the moment, the escape into whimsy is far more prevalent than the political.

The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. … I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.

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.

Music, and art for that matter, to me is not about true meaning to anyone else but yourself. If I told you the meaning of it all from my point of view it would erase the intimacy of art. I feel like art is up for interpretation, so if I told you my meaning, how could you truly relate it to anything that “you” personally are going through?? That is the beauty of art and music in particular

I love knowing and learning about people around the world displaying my art online. Also, it's how I learn about new artists that are in various parts of the world. The positive thing about Tumblr and Instagram is that they're a fantastic platform for art lovers. I also like, when I search for my art and it says, "see also or related artists," and I see those other artists that relate to me, at least according to the internet. I think it's fascinating - it's interesting to see hashtags people are using in relation to my work. It's another tool of communication.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

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.

I want to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. It was only later, after admitting this dream, that I noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries begin with the letter I. A fairly auspicious sign, it seemed, on a voyage of self-discovery.

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

It seems like the big difference between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love, with having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

DAILY TRAINING in the Art of Peace allows your inner divinity to shine brighter and brighter. Do not concern yourself with the right and wrong of others. Do not be calculating or act unnaturally. Keep your mind focused on the Art of Peace, and do not criticize other teachers or traditions. The Art of Peace never restrains or shackles anything. It embraces all and purifies everything.

I love art, my mother is a painter, I majored in art history at Wellesley, and as I was having my second child I was thinking, what am I going to do, I have to do something to keep myself sane, and I began to ask myself, what are the most horrific circumstances under which art can be created?

Look. Art knows no prejudice, art knows no boundaries, art doesn't really have judgement in it's purest form. So just go, just go.

You don't own art. What does that mean? We are trustees of art. Art is in transit with us. That is why an auction is a wonderful thing. You clap your hands and the objects fly away like doves and find other places where they will be protected, loved. That's what I believe.

Politics is a part of life and art is about life. It doesn't mean that all the art has to be about politics - in fact, heaven forbid. But politics is a totally legitimate area of focus for any art, whether it's painting or songwriting or anything else, as much as sex is, as much as spirituality is, as much as any other behavior of people is.

I don't have a favorite place to see art. I like to encounter it anywhere, museum, gallery, home, studio, street... I do prefer to see good art, when I see art, but it doesn't matter where I see it.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

Thought is more important than art....To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.

I don't like getting hit for one, although you know I did take Aikido for many years, but Aikido is a different kind of martial art, maybe even a more cerebral art because it's all about redirecting the energies of your opponent instead of trying to bash your opponent's head in effectively, so it's a much more loving art, so I guess I tend that way normally anyway.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854)

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.

I realized that the only possible response was to go to my wonderful local café, Maison Bertaux, check everyone was well, eat a little cake and then make art. To me, making art, and in particular public art, is always an assertion of our humanity and our strength.

'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.

The cinema was certainly an art, but television can't be, because it is the museum of accidents. In other words, its art is to be the site where all accidents happen. But that's its only art.

While appropriation art is critical to art, it's an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court.

It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, its perfect. You dont have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. Thats where its found. Its found within you.

I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love. It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigor of the earlier world?

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us.

In Mexico, muralism is an important part of the artistic vocabulary, and it has a very different place than it does in the US. Here, you see mainly commercial signage and dead slick graphic works, or murals that are incredibly narrative and littered with too much content - bad political art. But in Mexicali, all kinds of artists work with mural art. In Mexicali, the social practice of art existed in a completely authentic and unselfconscious way.

I started as an artist and I had a side job moving some heavy boxes for a publishing company. They had just gotten a Mac for their art department, the department that creates the book covers. I was kind of showing the art director a thing or two about how to use a Mac. And one day everyone went out to lunch and I jumped on the computer and designed a book jacket and slipped it in the pile to go to the review board in New York. They picked my jacket and when the art director got back to Boston, he wanted to know who designed it and I said, "Me." He was like, "The box guy?"

We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.