Quotes About Artists

Artists look at the environment, and the best artists correctly diagnose the problem. I'm not saying artists can't be leaders, but that's not the job of art, to lead. Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte - there are artists all through history who have become leaders, but that was already in them, nothing to do with their art.

We get better product when the focus is on the fans and the artists - all artists; musical artists; singers, the graphic designers, the painters, the DJs, I mean everybody, the writers. We can't allow ourselves to feel as if we're not important in the equation when we are everything!

Artists 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.

I feel like artists that are always quite sad in real life always make really happy music, and artists who are really bouncy and bubbly always make really sad music.

I think the defect actually lies with male artists. Male artists often border on idiocy, while it's important for a woman not to be that way, if possible. Women are outstanding in science, just as good as men.

Artists have their existential questions as human beings, and they address these questions in their works. But they are also thinking in a broader sense when they participate in a social and political debate through their works. Often the most important voices of artists in the political and the social debate are focused on originality in their works. We can see this in historical pieces, like "Guernica" by Picasso. "Guernica" was an extremely important manifestation and critique against war, but it was important and powerful because it was also an incredibly original and powerful work of art.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

I really admire artists who take the time to recharge their batteries and not continually call on it. I think you can spot tired and jaded artists quite quickly.

I think that what most artists are trying to do is trying to understand. I think what distinguishes creative people and/or artists from another type of person is perhaps a willingness to go headlong into that uncertainty.

A lot of artists still will not get that far. And get that far and be as successful. So, it's a great thing for me, and hopefully I can make it to number 10. And then I would want to start managing other artists, 'cause I think the best manager is an artist, his, or herself, that has been in the business and been successful and knows the ins and outs of the business.

Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.

One of the main things that differentiates them [artists of 70s] from artists before is that they made albums based on the fact that they didn't care about the band as a thing in its own right. They cared about manipulating the recording and that became the album.

There are female artists I can look at that I find more in common with than the male artists, because they're blending the pop, dance and theatricality... but currently there aren't a lot of guys who go there.

There are 100,000 artists on Pandora & 70% are indies; artists making $100K - $2 million.

I think that these are different times, and different things are available to artists, and certain things have become passé. You've already seen the outcome of a lot of things that seemed to have a lot of potential. We've already heard that, and I can't tell you if it made a difference or not. But we already know that artists can do that, and they shouldn't feel threatened by doing it. They're probably not going to change the world. They're going to change a few people's perspectives and maybe make somebody's day at times, if they can.

When I first came to New York, in the '70s, artists were certainly divided about the Andy Warhol persona, and about the work. I thought it was utterly cool - I thought the Factory was utterly glamorous - but there were a lot of artists I really admired and respected who were older that kind of dismissed it, couldn't get it, and felt that there was a lack of seriousness about it.

As a new artist, you come out, and there are so many other new artists. It seems like there's a whole wave of new artists that come along every year. In '05, I was part of the crop. It was a lot harder trying to set myself apart from the rest of the pack.

Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.

Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists.

I think for us, we don't feel like the future of music is in the act of being a record company. We feel like the future of the music business is in empowering artists to have better and better tools to communicate with their fans. We want to be people who are saying to artists, "Look, you don't need that company over there to release your album. You can do it this way." Almost more of a band partnership than a label-artist relationship. Not about ownership of content, but about empowerment.

And I hate to see artists who are real safe. I love to see artists swing for the fences sometimes.

Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages.

Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped people understand their own feelings...pictures that enriched their own experiences and celebrated their own lives. But the art establishment branded him an 'illustrator', a sentimental one at that. Real artists, they said were doing art for art's sake, not for the sake of the bourgeois public. Real artists were putting swiggles, smears or daubs of paint on the canvas. They were doing 'innovative' and 'creative' work. If they were hideous and grotesque; we know that's what life really is!

Artists react to tragedy by doing something both as a way for us as artists to process our pain and our grief and our loss and as a way to give something back and memorialize people that are lost. That always makes it far harder to compartmentalize things. As a species, should never get used to tragedy and we should do everything we can to prevent it from happening and to celebrate people loving people. We should all be lucky enough to be loved and to love someone in return. That's what this is about.

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.’ But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

Working with artists and other poets has made me aware that there was a bigger "me" that I hadn't been quite aware of. Plus we had a good time. It's so much fun to write, for example, with a big brush on a giant piece of paper and to help create visually attractive and surprising objects, which is not what you normally do when you're writing a poem. It's wonderful to create these pieces with artists.

I do know that there is a difference between artists who are career-driven and artists who have a calling and are just compelled to make music, compelled to perform live, and the business isn't the reason they're doing it. In fact, there isn't really a reason. You just do it.

I think the role of artists in the past was very different. Artists had less responsibility in many ways.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

I think, sometimes, artists release music too fast. If you just sit back and listen to the track for a little bit you could pick and choose how you want to do it and see if you really feel the song, because sometimes you might not even like the song after a few listens.

Canada has been a breeding ground for great comedic actors, sketch artists and stand-up comedians. We grew up with a different perspective on the world.

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.

Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends.

The finest and healthiest thing about science is, as in the mountains, the brisk air blowing around in it.--The spiritually delicate (such as artists) shun and slander science owing to this air.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

When artists give form to revelation, their art can advance, deepen and potentially transform the consciousness of their community.

I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

I can truthfully say, in arts I have pretty much seen and done it all and, at my age, I have no patience with wide-eyed artists fooling themselves about their place in history. We should know by now that it is the whim of the elite few who set the rules... those who have fooled themselves into believing that they are God's gift to the ages.

When I joined, I was one of the first artists to sign on to the Motown West label when they opened their first studio in California. At the studio, you'd run into Stevie Wonder, you'd run into Marvin Gaye…it was very special.

My favorite artists have always been Elvis and The Beatles and they still are!

I want people to know about these visionary artists. I want people to know what they stand for and (that) they are representing something unique, something fresh. I am just so excited about their careers.

I'm not mainstream at all. I can make mainstream music and I make music for mainstream artists, but me, myself, I'm not mainstream.

I've shared meditation with a lot of hip-hop artists, inmates, and returning war veterans with PTSD, as well. I feel like this dharma, this service is part of my job.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

I feel like the internet also affects originality a lot, because music is so easily shared nowadays, it seems like artists have collectively explored most of the grounds that music has to offer.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

Vienna is relatively small. And it had wonderful salons, opportunities for people to get together. There was a lot of interaction between scientists and non-scientists, between Jews and non-Jews, between artists, writers and scientists, including medical scientists.

The influence that Oakland has on my sound is about 90%. There's so many different elements to Oakland. Of course you have the street elements, but then you also have the culture and there's so much culture around. It's a competitive city, it's full of just great artists and talent. It gave me the confidence, the passion, the realness I try my hardest to portray, so it has had about 90% influence on me.