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.

Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art.

It is a thoughtless and immodest presumption to learn anything about art from philosophy. Some do begin as if they hoped to learnsomething new here, since philosophy cannot and should not do anything further than develop the given art experiences and the existing art concepts into a science, improve the views of art, and promote them with the help of a thoroughly scholarly art history, and produce that logical mood about these subjects too which unites absolute liberalism with absolute rigor.

Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Whatever they are, can Comics be "Art"? Of course they can. The "Art" in a piece is something independent of genre, form, or material. My feeling is that most paintings, most films, most music, most literature and, indeed, most comics fail as "Art." A masterpiece in any genre, form or material is equally "good." It's ridiculous to impose a hierarchy of value on art. The division between high and low art is one that cannot be defended because it has no correlation to aesthetic response.

He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful. "Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life." Thus sang the Rishis of the Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. "He is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life."

I think that a lot of artists have succeeded in making what I might call "curator's art." Everybody's being accepted, and I always want to say, "Really? That's what you've come for? To make art that looks a lot like somebody else's art?" If I am thinking of somebody else's art in front of your art, that's a problem.

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

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?

Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn't be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound.

What is the art experience about? Really, I'm not interested in making Art at all. I never, ever, think about it. To say the word Art, it's almost like a curse on art. I do know that I want to try to get closer to myself. The older I get, the more indications I have about what it is to get closer to yourself. You try less hard. I just want to be.

Art begs you to notice it. Why? Because art is God's way of saying hello. So pay attention to poetry. Pay attention to music. Pay attention to paintings and sculptures and photo exhibits and ballets and plays. Don't let all this go unnoticed. Your world is shouting out to you, revealing something intrinsically glorious about itself. Listen carefully. Love art, the way art loves life.

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

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.

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.

Maybe Japan itself is a little similar in that a lot of young people seem to have a little knowledge but not too much depth. I guess my perception of the art specialists in America or in Europe is that the art people are kind of mainly just the art people and that community is self-contained. But in Japan, it mixes with fashion and other things. I'm sure that many authentic art dealers or insiders didn't like the way that we presented our show in this very pop-y, accessible manner - just showing parts of our collections and selling prints and collaborative products.

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.

An art critic is someone who appreciates art, except for any particular piece of art.

Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.

The great thing about doing art shows is you get to meet the people who are interested in your art, and I think that when you're purchasing a piece of art it's a tremendous bonus to get to meet the artist because you get a chance to pick their brain a bit and find out first hand what the piece is about for the artist.

What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I’m not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.

I worked in an art gallery for a few years, doing administrative assistance stuff, and it exposed me to what the whole world of art dealers and the art market was about.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: 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. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art.

I trust people who are violent about art, as long as they aren't closed-minded. But, unfortunately, most art blowhards are also art bigots.

Much of the art of the 1960s, from body art to video and direct performance, was concerned with similar issues. And then there was media art, which made it possible to express things directly, without having to rely on the written word, which was manipulated by men.

People think that the art market is about opportunists and hedge-fund managers getting broken art, but what really happened is that there was a new configuration of bourgeois values in the U.S. and an acceptance among the bourgeoisie of contemporary art as an idea. I think that bourgeois people are horrible.

Making your bed could be a piece of art, and writing a book could be a piece of art. You could also write a book that's not a piece of art, but that is a book, and it could be a book that was written by an artist.

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.

In magic we have a variety of "uses" for our art beyond magic itself, which reminds me of the notion of art therapy. The rendering of art inferior to therapy is an interesting one: interesting in the sense that it makes me want to vomit angrily.

Prehistoric art came to move me much more than Greek art. Greek art has beautiful women and handsome men, but I don't care.

Art is sexy! Art is money-sexy! Art is money-sexy-social-climbing-fantastic!

A great work of art is one that truly moves and inspires you. You yourself must be moved. Don't look at art with others' eyes. Don't listen to music with others' ears. You must react to art with your own feelings, your own heart and mind.

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.

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?

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.

To be pleasing to God, art must be true as well as good. Truth has always been one important criterion for art. Art is the incarnation of the truth. It penetrates the surface of things to portray them as they really are.

There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

Only Art is Eternal Wisdom; what is not Art soon perishes. Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist.

I think you too recognize the important relationship between philosophy and art, and it is just this relationship that most painters deny. The great masters do grasp it, unconsciously; but I believe that a painter's conscious spiritual knowledge will have a much greater influence upon his art, and that it would be due only to a weakness in him, or lack of genius, should this spiritual knowledge be harmful to his art.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

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.

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

In the USA, we learn "art history" as Western art history, and the history of Asian, or African art is a special case; we learn politics by examining our own government system, and consider other systems special cases, and the same is true of philosophy.