Quotes About Art

I think a lot of people are involved in art because of the fashion of art and the conversation. It gives them a certain sophistication, something to speak about. But art is, if it's conceptual, really about understanding the concept. And if it's beautiful, it's about seeing the beauty. It's gone much further than that now. There's too much commercialism attached to art. If the market cracks one day big-time, you'll frighten so many people away who will never come back. Because they don't really feel for art. People who buy art should want it because they love it, they want to enjoy it.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

Art is personal, originating from dreams, ideas, neuroses; art is shared, harkening back to the humans around the fire; art imbues pleasure and power by enabling people to know reality...Art is a necessity because it is a way of knowing...Is the need for truth physiological? Art exists out of time...images may be different bu there is always a repetition- a thread.

Much like teaching art to young art students age 10 to 15 or so on, you have to break it down into bite-sized pieces, essential components. You have to - you know, at this point I'm so used to operating within given assumptions about art. But when you're explaining art to art students or people who are new to this experience, you have to really go back to the fundamentals.

(...) contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists. (...) For many art world insiders and art aficionados of other kinds, concept-driven art is a kind of existencial channel through which they bring meaning to their lives. It demands leaps of faith, but it rewards the believer with a sense of consequence. Moreover, just as churches and other ritualistic meeting places serve a social function, so art events generate a sense of community around shared interests

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.

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?

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.

Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display.... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art.

Art shouldn't be something that you go quietly into an art gallery and dip your forelock and say 'I have to be very quiet, I'm in here amongst the art.' It's here, art's everywhere. It's how you use your eyes. It's about the enjoyment of visual things. And it's certainly not for any one group of people.

For me, architecture is an art the same as painting is an art or sculpture is an art. Yet, architecture moves a step beyond painting and sculpture because it is more than using materials. Architecture responds to functional outputs and environmental factors. Yet, fundamentally, it is important for me to stress the art in architecture to bring harmony.

Art can mean a lot of things. At the heart of it, art is doing something you really believe in. Like my wife, she volunteers helping underprivileged kids, that's her art. To me, anything that you do that you truly believe in makes you an artist. It doesn't necessarily mean being a painter or a film maker. That's art, but there's more to it than that. As long as you're pouring your heart and soul into what you're doing, that's the weapon.

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.

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.

To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.

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 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 don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.

Fairfield Porter who has been my model for art writing all along, said that if the most interesting thing about a work of art is its content, it's probably a failure. I think it's true that if you find yourself thinking about the meaning in an author's message, it's probably not very interesting as art. Obviously, this is a tough concept, because if you withdraw intention.

Art becomes a spiritual process depending upon the degree of commitment that you bring to it. Every experience becomes direct food for your art. Then your art teaches you about life.

I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change peoples consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.

I can never fathom it when people say things like "I can't understand abstract art!" Or: "Abstract art is junk!" Or: "Abstract art isn't as valid as realism!"

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.

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.

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

A lot of people, especially Christians, want to put you in this box of being a Christian actor, and I don't believe in it. You do yourself and everyone else a big disservice when you start thinking about it as "Christian art." That's why most Christian art is bad. They don't put a premium on the "art."

When I began making art, I just thought I liked it. As a woman who was placed in spaces with various conditions, conventions, and restrictions on self-expression, turning to art - whether visual art, writing novels, or writing articles - was to gain freedom from the space around me.

'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.

There are so many different ways to talk and think about art. We just spoke about when attitude becomes form. But when I was a kid, I had these two art teachers, a couple, who were continuing a line of very classical, atelier art training, and they instilled in me a sensitivity to all the classical verities of line, shape, color, texture, and composition, which is only engaging if you're making two-dimensional objects.

It is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us more aware of what we are, and therefore of what the universe in which we live really is. And since mathematics, in its own way, also performs this function, it is not only aesthetically charming but profoundly significant. It is an art, and a great art.

In my own version of the idea of 'what art wants,' the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits.

With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.

By faith ponder on this, that though thou art no way able in or by thyself to get the conquest over thy distemper, though thou art even weary of contending, and art utterly ready to faint, yet that there is enough in Jesus Christ to yield thee relief.

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.

Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression. Art is a human activity- that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are touched by these feelings and also experience them.

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.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

I very much enjoyed Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? I can't quote it, it's been a while, but at the end of the day, the idea is that "art that does good in the world is art, and what doesn't is not. It's propaganda or something else. It's bad."

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.

When it comes to the street-art world, there are a lot of people who realize if they go out and put up a few pieces of street art and photograph them really well, even if their locations weren't actually that high-profile or dangerous, with the level of exposure they get from the Internet, with a large audience, they can maintain that rebel cache by having it be theoretically documented street art.

The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics--or more precisely, Revolution--co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church.

...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

It is not the poet's business to save man's soul but to make it worth saving . . . However, few poets have written with a clear theory of art for art's sake, it is by that theory alone that their work has been, or can be, judged; -and rightly so if we remember that art embraces all life and all humanity, and sees in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservative or revolutionary only the human grandeur or passion that inspires them.

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."