ART QUOTES V
quotations about art
Whether it is the beautiful that brings to our hearts the love of truth and justice, or whether it is truth that teaches us how to find the beautiful in nature and how to love it, in either case art does a noble work. It drags out the soul from its everyday shell, and brings it under the spell of its own mysterious and wonderful power, so that a memory of this experience stays with the people, sustains them in their daily labors, and refines their minds.
HELENA MODJESKA
"Women and the Stage", The World's Congress of Representative Women
Art ... is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
interview, July 5, 2005
Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On the Level of Desire"
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.
MARY OLIVER
The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9, 1992
Nature is a haunted house -- but Art -- a House that tries to be haunted.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, 1876
Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, Paper Magazine, September 17, 2014
Realism and art cannot live together.
JENNETTE LEE
The Ibsen Secret
The artist does not really create; he discovers.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Great Companion
Art -- the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
JAMES THURBER
Collecting Himself
Art begins with resistance -- at the point where resistance is overcome.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.
LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON
Speak
The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
JOHN BERGER
The Sense of Sight
Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Strong Opinions
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
Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.
JEAN ANOUILH
The Rehearsal
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
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
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
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 not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO TOLSTOY
What is Art?