quotations about art
I'd always thought of art as something that was expressed through certain tools: painting, sculpture, photography, writing, film, music, architecture. And yes, performance. But this performance went beyond performance. This was life.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Walk Through Walls: A Memoir
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
Art is the signature of man.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Everlasting Man
The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
WALT WHITMAN
preface, Leaves of Grass
If they don't know what you're doin'
Babe it must be art.
U2
"Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"
Computers creating art is an upsetting concept mostly because of what it means about humans.
JASON LEE MILLER
"Automated Content Will Unmake Existence"
The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.
FERRAN ADRIA
Disegno Daily, Apr. 28, 2014
Art is man added to Nature.
FRANCIS BACON
Descriptio Globi Intellectus
Thus, then ... are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation: the medium, the objects, and the manner.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
The work of art is a revelation of the innate goodness of matter. Matter narcissistically mirrors itself in art, with the artist's hidden hand that holds the mirror up, the impersonal mechanism by means of which matter makes its perfection manifest.
DONALD BURTON KUSPIT
Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
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
Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds.
PETER ABRAHAMS
End of Story
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