quotations about art
Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.
NADINE GORDIMER
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1991
Art is the signature of man.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Everlasting Man
Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.
ALICE NEEL
"Art Is a Form of History", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Pleasures of Life
If you are really creatively engaged with the thing we call ART, it is a 24/7 preoccupation. It can and does seep into all areas of your life.
JAMES GUPPY
"Judging art is a classic business", Echo Netdaily, March 16, 2016
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Making art is dealing with people on your own terms. The ideal way of using people is using them like clay, but that being out of the question, except for lunatics and leaders, art is a good alternative.
LUCAS SAMARAS
"Another Autointerview", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
It's not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us--a book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth between times--as different from each other as those other creatures--jellyfish, aren't they, of a kind?--where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness.
EDITH WHARTON
"The Legend", Tales of Men and Ghosts
Computers creating art is an upsetting concept mostly because of what it means about humans.
JASON LEE MILLER
"Automated Content Will Unmake Existence"
Art arises in those strange complexities of action that are called human beings. It is a kind of human behavior. As such it is not magic, except as human beings are magical. Nor is it concerned in absolutes, eternities, "forms," beyond those that may reside in the context of the human being and be subject to his vicissitudes. Art is not an inner state of consciousness, whatever that may mean. Neither is it essentially a supreme form of communication. Art is human behavior, and its values are contained in human behavior.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
Art is long, and the talk about it is even longer.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
Thus, then ... are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation: the medium, the objects, and the manner.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
If they don't know what you're doin'
Babe it must be art.
U2
"Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"
I don't think there's any more dispiriting sight than a great work of art reduced to a slogan on a mug.
CRAIG BROWN
Daily Telegraph, November 22, 2010