Popular quotes about Artist! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 64
There questions of wanting to be an artist, and what does that mean, what makes you an artist? Are you an artist if you're in a gallery in New York and not an artist if you're doing it at home? Do you need legitimation to count? If you've been acculturated to believe that you have certain obligations - familial, social, human - if multitasking has been your forte and that's what's been praised and rewarded, where do you find the single-mindedness, the selfishness to do something like art? I think those are questions that arise differently for women and for men.
Claire MessudMaking social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
Susan SontagAllowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
Pauline KaelSome people feel that it's controversial if I say that because my dad is known as a political artist. But I don't really believe that he was a political artist. I think some of his songs were political, and I think they were incredible because he was able to make art that was political and that wasn't pedantic. But I think he was unique in being able to do that.
Sean LennonIf sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.
John F. KennedyThe great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.
Robert Olen ButlerBeing an artist, I had an artist's instincts.You can see the picture before it's taken; then it's up to you to get the camera to see
James Van Der ZeeMy dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time. He was always so frustrated having to work to support the family that I was like, I'm never going to do that. I don't want to just be working a menial job to support my family and dreaming of being an artist. We learn from our fathers in that way.
Rainn WilsonYou can't expect to be on MTV and critique George Bush. You can't expect to be on BET or the cover of 'The Source' advocating Jesus Christ or Buddha or Hindu Krishna or Moses. As a conscious rap artist, you have to play in the arena that you're supposed to be in. What is that arena? That arena is the college market. The conscious rap artist woos the college market, even though the college market is the wildest, most sexed-out, drug-driven market in the country, possibly the world.
KRS-OneI leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.
Taylor SwiftEvery man or woman is a potential poet or artist. Everyone has the capacity to bring to their work the dignity, purposefulness, and presence of the artist.
Laurence BoldtI believe that a truly valuable artist must be an artist who realizes the impossibility of his task -and then continues to do it.
Keith JarrettA true priest is aware of the presence of the altar during every moment that he is conducting a service. It is exactly the same way that a true artist should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater. An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist.
Constantin StanislavskiI really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
Andy WarholI discovered that it was a lonely world being a solo artist. Then I started working with another solo artist, Rod Stewart, and he used to tell me how lonely he was!
Andrew TaylorThat is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he or she stole, and from whom? With the artist it is not how much he or she took from whom, but what the artist did with it.
Lukas FossAll art is propaganda. ... The only difference is the kind of propaganda. Since art is essential for human life, it can't just belong to the few. Art is the universal language, and it belongs to all mankind. All painters have been propagandists or else they have not been painters. ... Every artist who has been worth anything in art has been such a propagandist. ... Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else. ... I want to use my art as a weapon.
Diego RiveraOne of the things that I am happy about in my life as an artist is that I am not considered a Hispanic artist.
Andres Serrano...why is an artist an artist? Artists simply do feel and see things in a different way to other people. In a way it's a blessing, but it can also be a terrible curse. There's a great deal of satisfaction to be earned from it but often it's also a terrible burden.
Roger WatersAn artist has to train his responses more than other people do. He has to be as disciplined as a mathematician. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom. It prepares an artist to choose his own limitations.
Wayne ThiebaudAn artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.
Seth GodinThere are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.
Christian WimanArtists love other artists. Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright. Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist-hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch.
Julia CameronI'd really want to - just from my own experience as an artist working with a writer, I'd want to do everything I could to tailor it to the artist I was working with.
David FinchEven though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
Maya LinSo there's a cloud of rage around me, but being an artist kind of changes that. No matter what you thought coming in, what ignorant thing you believed, you're in show business for two years, you're like, "OK, I was wrong." It's hard to be mad at any particular group of people when you're an artist.
Chris RockI remember the excitement of being a new artist. When up and coming artists ask me like, "Any advice you have for me?" I always say, "Take it all in because you'll never be a new artist again".
Brooke ValentineIf I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others - a received pronunciation.
Charles SaatchiI always thought Cyrano De Bergerac was a coward. He could fight a hundred swordsmen, but he was afraid of his nose, and he was afraid of Roxanne. Jam as cowardly as anybody about facing my fears. So, you spend your you years as an artist fighting those hundred people that you happen not to fear. Then you wake up one morning and realize all this time you're afraid of your nose. That's what you're going to have to face for the rest of your life. And you don't feel very courageous. But, if you don't face it, you dry up as an artist.
Michael VenturaLenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.
Benito MussoliniGuillermo del Toro. He's in his pure artist's stroke. He's just hitting it out of the park. I would go anywhere to work with him. He's a real artist.
Jeffrey TamborOnce we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.
Herbert ReadI'm a fashion designer. What I do is artistic, but I'm not an artist because everything I do is destined to be sold. That's not to say that you can't be an artist and a fashion designer. I think some designers are artists.
Tom FordI work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.
August WilsonWhen you become an artist you're working away from home for so much time. You really see what the use of time means to you once you're an artist and you travel so much.
Schoolboy QMaybe my work looks a little crazy, a little insane, but I don't really see myself as a crazy artist or a shaman artist.
Julian SchnabelShepard Fairey, the street artist responsible for President Obama's 'Hope' poster, is now facing vandalism charges in Detroit. It's pretty serious. Detroit officials say the artist's spray paint caused over $9,000 worth of improvements.
Jimmy FallonArt is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.
Carl AndreI used to flirt with fundamentalism, and I had this idea that creation was something that happened. Now I see creation as something that is happening. Hundreds of millions of stars are still being born every day. Creation is an ongoing process. The Artist has not yet cleaned out the brushes. The paint is still wet. Human beings are the small clumps of clay and breath, and we have been handed brushes of our own, like young artist apprentices. The brushes aren't ours, nor the paint or canvas, but here they are in our hands, on loan. What shall we make?
Michael GungorLife, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.
Anais NinThe use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.
Edward Steichen