ART QUOTES XI
quotations about art
What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature... (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms).
DONALD BARTHELME
"The Sandman"
The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.
ANDRE GIDE
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality
Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"My Bill of Rights", The Diabolical Principle
Art is never chaste. We forbid it to the ignorant innocents, never allow a contact with it to those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. And, if it's chaste it isn't art.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
For the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Dagger with Wings
Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it.
FRANK ZAPPA
attributed, Dictionary of Quotations
Aesthetic culture is not the high-road to all the virtues, and, indeed, certain of the vices have been known to infest it. Neither, on the other hand, is there any special grace in ugliness. Art is only utterance. It must express something; and the vital question is, what does it express?
LEWIS FOREMAN DAY
Everyday Art
Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
The only original part in a work of art is the infusion of the artist's own character, if he has one.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
YANN MARTEL
Life of Pi
The shapely female form has no place in Art!
PRINCIPAL SKINNER
The Simpsons
We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair ... pick another profession.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Letters to a Young Artist
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
speech to Royal Academy of Art, 1953
Art still has truth. Take refuge there.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Memorial Verses
Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
OSCAR WILDE
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Men are momentary but art is forever.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN
"Men Are Momentary, But Art Is Forever In 'Innocents And Others'", NPR, March 15, 2016
There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for.
JULIAN BARNES
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
It is difficult to prove that any age has been propitious for the artist; Socrates was condemned to death, so were Seneca and Petronius, Dante was exiled, the age of Louis XIV was one of both civil and religious persecution; the nineteenth century, as the lawsuits against Flaubert, Baudelaire, Hugo, etc., show, was not much better; and in the twentieth century there are whole tracts of Europe where to be a writer is to invite a firing-squad. "Silence, exile, and cunning" are the artist's lot, and, exquisite though his happiness will be when his public, educated at last, mobs him like a film-star, we may be wiser to assume that, for our lifetime, "silence, exile, and cunning" it will remain.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Condemned Playground
The swing of art is circular, from form to formalism, from formalism to formlessness, from formlessness to form again.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought