ART QUOTES XIII
quotations about art
The artist and the multitude are natural enemies. They always will be, both ways. The artist is an enemy of the multitude, and the multitude is the enemy of the artist. And when the disguise comes off and they're both standing facing one another, they're just there at odds end.
ROBERT ALTMAN
interview with F. Anthony Macklin, 1976
It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
letter to his son John, 1927
Art never expresses anything but itself.
OSCAR WILDE
The Decay of Lying
The scope of art is practically boundless; it does not begin and end with the painting of pictures and the modeling of statues; where there is room for workmanship there is room for it.
LEWIS FOREMAN DAY
Everyday Art
The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
It seems to me that the arts are rather flourishing. There's an awful lot of bad art about because of this, but that's true of every great era. I'm sure there was a lot dreadful art in the Renaissance that we fortunately don't see today.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Atlantic, Oct. 15, 1997
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Decay of Lying", The Works of Oscar Wilde
At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history every published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but not recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
Art is but a mirror, which gives back what is cast on its surface faithfully only while unsullied.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
There's no art where there's no fee.
ARISTOPHANES
Plutus
The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Goal
The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
In the arts, people are always waiting for someone or some movement to "fulfill her/its/his promise." Then, half-a-dozen or a dozen years on, others begin to realize that, really, something extraordinary was actually happening.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
interview, SF Site, Apr. 2001
At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.
FERRAN ADRIA
Disegno Daily, Apr. 28, 2014
Art is man added to Nature.
FRANCIS BACON
Descriptio Globi Intellectus
The work of art is a revelation of the innate goodness of matter. Matter narcissistically mirrors itself in art, with the artist's hidden hand that holds the mirror up, the impersonal mechanism by means of which matter makes its perfection manifest.
DONALD BURTON KUSPIT
Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries