ART QUOTES VII
quotations about art
Art is one of man's few serious activities.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO TOLSTOY
What is Art?
Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Art begins with resistance -- at the point where resistance is overcome.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
Art ... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Art Objects
All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.
ROMAN PAYNE
Rooftop Soliloquy
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
W. H. AUDEN
"A Poet of the Actual", Forewords and Afterwords
You need the art in order to love the life.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.
OSCAR WILDE
"Art and the Handicraftsman"
Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated, just as for a mother the cause of sexual conception is love. The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife's love is the birth of a new man into life. The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
It is hard to convey the night-waking, body-trembling experience of putting a creation of one's soul out into the world for acceptance and rejection.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
guest post, The Dark Phantom, October 29, 2008
Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Art sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
REBECCA WEST
The Strange Necessity
The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
WILLIAM JAMES
letter to Henry Rutgers Marshall, Feb. 7, 1899
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter, Feb. 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet
True art consists in the concealment of art.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Don't worry about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.
ANDY WARHOL
attributed, "Andy Warhol's Best Advice about Art", Flavorwire, August 6, 2012