Quotes About Artists

The artists could be dead, but some of them are not so distant from us, and make us feel as if they are alive with us. Such artists are worth calling "contemporary artists".

The music business is suffering because fewer artists are being invested in. Labels are putting in less money, taking fewer risks and signing half as many artists as they did 10 years ago. Everything is risk averse right now and there are two ways to deal with a business situation like this: either reduce your risk or increase your return. They're reducing their risk to the bone and looking for ways with their 360 deals to increase their return. They're still not making money. Artists are suffering. Labels, or music investors, are suffering.

Bad artists ignore the darkness of human existence. Good artists often get stuck there. Great artists embrace the full catastrophe of our condition and find beyond it an even deeper truth of peace, healing, and redemption.

Because U.K. artists aren't compensated when their music is played on U.S. radio ­stations, U.S. artists aren't ­compensated when their records are played on U.K. stations based on the fact that there's no reciprocity. If that income came in, our ­artists would be paying income taxes on it. So if we can get a lot of policy on the radar, that may have some positive influence.

I think what happened in the last 10 or 15 years in the art market is that all the players - and that includes artists, dealers, art advisors, everyone - basically became dealers. We've had old-school collectors morph into speculators, flipping works. We've seen auction houses buying works directly from artists or from sleazy middlemen. The last step before the crash was the artists themselves supplying the auction houses. Dealing themselves, you know? The art world is as unregulated as any financial market there is.

One of our chief needs as creative beings is support. Unfortunately, this can be hard to come by. Ideally, we would be nurtured and encourages first by our nuclear family and then by ever-widening circles of friends, teachers, well-wishers. As young artists, we need and want to be acknowledged for our attempts and efforts as well as for our achievements and triumphs. Unfortunately, many artists never receive this critical early encouragement. As a result, they may not know they are artists at all.

It's not curators, it's not critics, it's not the public, it's not collectors who find great artists - it's other artists.

A lot of bands are still just bands that artists ask to get involved, but a lot of artists are using sound they create. This is different from referencing music.

I have noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.

With success it's like 60% talent, maybe 20% luck and then 20% being at the right place at the right time. There are so many artists that have been passed by - even though, on paper, they're the most incredibly talented artists, they don't have the social skills to take it outside of the bedroom.

If you want to speak about different ethnicities and diversity, rap and hip-hop are all over the planet. Every country, from Turkey to Australia, now has tons of hip-hop artists. The music and artistry have moved way faster than the corporatization of the music. You do need organization and opportunity for these artists to express themselves, and I don't think it has to come from a corporate co-signing.

MTV has always given artists a platform to get their stories and music out to their fans and this series reveals the unknown side of T.I.-one of the world's greatest artists at the most precarious time in his life.

You witness the artists acting as witnesses, but they provide a point of view that's less monolithic. It's less official in a certain way. Many artists are speaking in the first person singular, as a reaction to dubbed-over media commentary. The thought is: "Enough with how we're represented by the media. Let me tell the story."

Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

I paved the way for a lot of white artists now that don’t have to deal with the stigma of being a white artist. I don’t think that people would be as open for non-African American artists like that if it I didn’t take a lot of the slack for them.

With the artists that I named - Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Madonna, every time they come out with a new album, something's slightly different. In the case of Madonna, she'll come with one joint that'll be left, and then come totally right, but it's always hot. She's just got style. So, at the end, I want my name to be up there with those artists; for people to say, he's one of those iconic figures you can't put in a box.

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.

Country music fans are extremely passionate and loyal. It seems that country artists have longer-lasting careers because the fans stick with the artists through thick and thin.

The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.

Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goals.

Sometimes there are painters or very famous artists who start to become artists after they are dead because an audience or a public know about their art after they die.

Elvis might have compromised his musical style a bit towards the end, but that doesn't mean that artists from the rock n' roll/folk-roots culture - of which he was not really a part - shouldn't get better as they get older, like the great jazz or blues artists.

I feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity.

But some great records are are being made with today's technology and there are still great artists among us. Likewise there are artists today who are so reliant on modern technology, they wouldn't have emerged when recording was more organic.

Trying to make your own sound is hard. When I was producing for other artists, I could just produce and write songs as a normal songwriter, and almost make them generic. The artists themselves, whoever is singing that song, can put their own twist on it. When it came to my own material, I had to really dig deep, because I was just writing generic stuff. It sounded like everybody else, like Justin Timberlake, like Usher. I never wanted to sound like someone, that's when you know it's not going to work.

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!

Coming from Britain, I was terrified of meeting all these other artists, because artists over there tend to fight with each other a lot, the premise being that there's not enough room for everybody.

I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.

I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists who were doing interesting thing, but I don't think people are terribly interested in young artists.

I'm definitely obsessed about artists and the type of music and the playing and the tone and all that kind of thing - I'm not obsessed about what the best Beatles album is. I just think if The Beatles are great, they're great.

Religion is a group of scam artists that sell the calming idea that your body is a temple of God, while your mind belongs to them.

That's the thing about great artists: They find the thing that's most obvious to themselves, what's most conscious and natural, and they put it out there and the audience comes.

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.

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

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

Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.

Visionary art sure has played a vital role in my own "soul's journey," and I would say it's been important for many artists and viewers throughout history. Visionary art is one of the primary ways that human contact with higher subtle dimensions gets translated into our communally shared physical dimension.

So one time for my disillusioned artists, I hear ya Two times for the kid that air-guitars in the mirror Three times for the 9-to-5-in' bus ridin' dudes And four times for my dreamers, yo I'm just like you That's why I sing for my queens with their own pair of wings My brothers flyin' beside me, drama behind me Mama tried to find me, she inquired emphatically I was in the sky with all these other ghetto kids, defying gravity, uh

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.

Many incredible artists die before they were famous.

If 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.

San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

If you look at all the artists I've ever worked with, I'm still blessed enough to have one of the biggest singles of their career. My passion is for them and I put my everything into these songs. i get into their life and what their aesthetic is. That's what's missing from R&B. People don't take it serious enough.

I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests.

I am really proud that I am one of the artists that has the opportunity to be on magazine covers and to be in the movies.

For me, being transparent about every aspect of my life is what makes my music relatable and how I'm able to be an individual amongst the mass amounts of other artists.