ART QUOTES IV
quotations about art
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
Keep doing what you like to do. That's all [art] is.
CORY ARCANGEL
interview with Stina Puotinen, Mar. 21, 2009
The job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter consumers to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's reexamine it.
DAVIE MAMET
interview, Salon, 1997
Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
One of the things pounded in to my head at the university level was that art is communication. So showing your art is not only good for your ego, but it's discovering you can be part of this conversation that has been going on as long as people have been painting in caves.
ROBERT LEMMING
"Art Is Communication: Artist turned teacher encourages conversation", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 11, 2016
Nature is a haunted house -- but Art -- a House that tries to be haunted.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, 1876
You need the art in order to love the life.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
preface, Salon of 1846
When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
No art is possible without a dance with death.
KURT VONNEGUT
Slaughterhouse-Five
Art is not Nature, art is Nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
Art, even as poetry, was to become not an escape from the narrowness of lived reality, but the overflow of intensified life.
ANNA BALAKIAN
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
I believe that economic prosperity and cultural wealth go hand in hand. This is why it is important to even further promote the cultural arts during times of economic slowdown.
OH SEUNG-JE
"All That Korean Art Is There for a Reason", New York Times, March 16, 2016
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
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
Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
Killing Yourself to Live
I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
"Riding with Death: The Final Years", Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988
The arts stop society going rotten and mad.
VANESSA REDGRAVE
interview, FT Magazine, Apr. 26, 2013
Art -- the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
JAMES THURBER
Collecting Himself