Quotes
Quotes about Art
Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.
Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.
Balance is the enemy of art.
Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness. - The Art of Being Ruled.
Art is Man's nature. Nature is God's art.
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.
The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.
One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.
I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific.' - "London Magazine", March, 1967.
The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.
Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it "joy"?.
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Great art picks up where nature ends.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
