Art Is Quotes

I decided honestly that comic art is an art form in itself. It reflects the life and times more accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration - since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business - he is playwright, director, editor and artist at once. ~ Alex Raymond

Always make your work be personal. And, you never have to lie ... There is something we know that's connected with beauty and truth. There is something ancient. We know that art is about beauty, and therefore it has to be about truth. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

All art is but imitation of nature. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

What makes art Christian art? Is it simply Christian artists painting biblical subjects like Jeremiah? Or, by attaching a halo, does that suddenly make something Christian art? Must the artist's subject be religious to be Christian? I don't think so. There is a certain sense in which art is its own justification. If art is good art, if it is true art, if it is beautiful art, then it is bearing witness to the Author of the good, the true, and the beautiful ~ R.C. Sproul

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation. ~ Ansel Adams

Art is elimination of the unnecessary. ~ Waldo Salt

Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people. ~ Kenneth Lonergan

Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ that close union of personality with perfection which forms the real distinction between the classical and romantic movement in life, but the very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the artist - an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich. Someone wrote to me in trouble, 'When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was the writer from what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either would have taught him that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your house in letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever happens to oneself happens to another. ~ Oscar Wilde

A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment. ~ Gerhard Richter

At it's essence, art is an alchemical process. Alchemy is a process of transformation. ~ Julia Cameron

Art is fast, but with art you're tied down. That's too negative. What I mean is, you have a business and a place that you go every day. I guess some artists do move around. ~ Cory Arcangel

Art Is Not A Mirror - It Is A Hammer. ~ John Grierson

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life. ~ Jeanette Winterson

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. ~ James Baldwin

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. ~ Susan Sontag

I'm always trying to find 'connections' between things. That art is the juxtaposition of a lot of things that seem unrelated but add up to something recognizable. ~ Pat Metheny

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do. ~ Aldous Huxley

Art is love creating the new world and justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one. ~ N. T. Wright

Art is eternal, but life is short. ~ Evelyn De Morgan

The only problem in art is to achieve a balance between subjective and objective. ~ Piet Mondrian

Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.' ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics. ~ Rachel Kushner

I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm covering innumerable concepts and derivative phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited. It is a principle that is present in every work of art, a force applied to it and a truth worked out in it. And I have never seen art as form but rather as a hidden, secret part of content ... A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways - by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art ... You can call it an idea, a statement about life, so all-embracing that it can't be split up into separate words; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work that includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work. ~ Boris Pasternak

As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments. ~ Banksy

Art is not about something, Art is something ~ Sarah Bernhardt

It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both. ~ George Henry Lewes

( ... ) contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists. ( ... ) For many art world insiders and art aficionados of other kinds, concept-driven art is a kind of existencial channel through which they bring meaning to their lives. It demands leaps of faith, but it rewards the believer with a sense of consequence. Moreover, just as churches and other ritualistic meeting places serve a social function, so art events generate a sense of community around shared interests ~ Sarah Thornton

The best martial artist doesn't win fights, but avoids fights. Martial arts is a way of gaining basic self-mastery of your mind, body and emotions. It can also be very useful in combat situations. ~ Frederick Lenz

Best thunderclap came from Spengler, to the effect that science is either true or false, art is either shallow or deep. Second best came from some Supreme Court Justice, Jackson, I think, to the effect that one man's right to swing his fists stops where another man's nose begins. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Great art is an escape from the agony of why. ~ Robert A. Kearse

Art is man added to Nature. ~ Francis Bacon

Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don't think art is elite or mysterious. ~ Ai Weiwei

His art is the health of the artist. ~ Harold Clurman

Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is. ~ Amiri Baraka

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue. ~ Benjamin Haydon

The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition. ~ C.S. Lewis

The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions. ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. ~ John F. Kennedy

Art is the act of doing work that matters while dancing with the voice in your head that screams for you to stop. ~ Seth Godin

Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace. ~ Hermann Hesse

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

Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. ~ Tristan Tzara

The business of art is to enlarge and correct the heart and to lift our ideals out of the ugly and the mean through love of the ideal ... The business of art is to appeal to the soul. ~ Florence Earle Coates

One continually hears the declaration that the direct primary [for legislative offices] will take power from the politicians and give it to the people. This is pure nonsense. Politics has been, is, and always will be carried on by politicians, just as art is carried on by artists, engineering by engineers, business by businessmen. All that the direct primary, or any other political reform, can do is affect the character of the politicians by altering the conditions that govern political activity, thus determining its extent and quality. The direct primary may take advantage and opportunity from one set of politicians and confer them upon another set, but politicians there will always be so long as there is politics. (Cited in Key 1965, 394-95) ~ Marty Cohen

I do not fear that "future generations will not read novels," etc. It is probably a complete misunderstanding to conceive of serious art in categories of production, market, readers, supply and demand( ... )art is not the fabrication of stories for readers but a spiritual cohabitation, something so tense and so separate from science, even contradictory to it, that there can be no competition between them. If someone fine, dignified, prolific, brilliant (this is how one ought to speak of artists this is the language art demands) is born in the future, if someone unique and unrepeatable is born, a Bach, a Rembrandt, then he will win people over, charm and seduce them ... ~ Witold Gombrowicz

Art is meant to provoke emotions, Avery. Its sole purpose is to arouse our senses, even if it disturbs. Even if it's ugly. Even if it fucking scares the living shit out of you. ~ Lara Adrian

Art is a well-articulated manifestation of an aspect of life. I have been privileged to view much of life through my cameras, making the journey an enlightened experience. My emphasis has mainly been on affirmative reactions to human behavior and a strong attraction to the beauty in nature. ~ Dennis Stock

The problem with trying to be relevant is it makes us copy what culture is already doing. To be relevant, you have to copy what is cool. So we put our mouths on the tailpipe of secular culture in hopes we can recycle some of it and use it for ourselves. The problem with this is that it automatically puts us ten to fifteen years behind culture because rather than setting the precedent, we are copying their systems. This is where we get a huge section of Christian apparel and coffee mugs that simply copy secular logos. My favorite is the shirt with the words "Holy Spirit" printed in the same font and logo as Sprite. Or the one with "A bread crumb and a fish" instead of Abercrombie and Fitch. We call it redeeming, but it's actually stealing. Making bad art is bad in and of itself, but if we are Christians, this takes on a whole other level of weight. Because we are called to mirror and reflect God, everything we do should give people a proper picture of who he is. ~ Jefferson Bethke

Art is neither a muscle nor a cure for ugliness. Ugliness has its own reasons and convictions to stay here. Art has a patience of a civilized, patience to withhold the gentleness of the civilization. ~ Ashutosh Gupta

Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something. ~ Rainbow Rowell

All art is propaganda. ~ George Orwell

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become. ~ Bruce Nauman

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own. ~ Michel De Montaigne

In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring. ~ Gregory Benford

The trouble with movies as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it's a business. ~ Charlton Heston

The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling. ~ Susanne Katherina Langer

I may be biased, but I think the cover art is stunning. ~ Patricia Leavy

Some say art is our highest form of hope ... Perhaps it's our only hope. ~ Roma Tearne

Art is a luxury. It's not necessary for you to - you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem. ~ Wynton Marsalis

Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution. ~ Theophile Gautier

It's in our nature. If you are a plumber, there is an objective way to establish whether you put together a great piping system or not. Art is a bit more slippery than that. So, when you fill a gallery with dirt and someone comes along waving wads of bills, it's difficult not to take them because they become a tangible acknowledgement that what you've been doing actually makes sense. ~ Maurizio Cattelan

Art is not in some far-off place. A work of art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sensibility and ability. ~ Shinichi Suzuki

Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know. ~ Willem De Kooning

Deconstruction seeks neither to reframe art with some perfect, apt and truthful new frame, nor simply to maintain the illusion of some pure and simple absence of a frame. Rather it shows that the frame is, in a sense, also inside the painting. For the frame is what "produces" the object of art, is what sets it off as an object of art - an aesthetic object. Thus the frame is essential to the work of art; in the work of art. Paint a $5,000 abstract painting on a railroad boxcar and nobody will pay a cent for it. Take a torch, remove the panel of the boxcar, install it in a gallery, and it will be worth $5,000. It will be art because it is now framed by the gallery. But at the same moment that the frame encloses the work in its own protected enclosure, making it a work of art, it becomes merely ornamental - external to the work of art. Thus is the frame central or marginal? Is the frame inside the work of art, essential to it, or outside the work of art, extrinsic to it? ~ James N. Powell

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. ~ Douglas Coupland

The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism. ~ Simon Schama

Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life. ~ Rebecca West

I put everything I can into a record. That's what art is for. I take a risk every time I do one with my whole being. ~ Dan Fogelberg

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Art is a terrible preacher, but a tremendous conversationalist. ~ Melanie Dale

The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan Kingsley or Kathy Bates who are better than your play. ~ Beth Henley

Life is art and art is life. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art. ~ Pablo Picasso

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life. ~ Maurice Sendak

A piece of art is never a finished work. It answers a question which has been asked, and asks a new question. ~ Robert Engman

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise - you can make anything. So please calm down now and get back to work, okay? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Whether art is defined as a representation of or response to reality, it demands an intense engagement with things we haven't managed to understand fully. ~ Joanna Scott

Art is about the messy and marvelous business of coming to your senses - and also, to the senses of the world. ~ Michael Leunig

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation. ~ Paul Gauguin

I don't really know what people's perception about Palestinians.All art is to better life. We want to create hope and share with others. Create more pleasure, and object to despair. Really it's about that. A space where we can be less aggressed upon. ~ Elia Suleiman

Pictorial art is relating tones to create beauty - like chords of music - not the faithful copying of the model. ~ Harvey Dunn

Art is not to do with the practical side of making a living. It's to live a fuller human life. ~ Henry Moore

Currencies are things that you use to pay for other things; commodities are things that you buy. If art is going to be one or the other, it's going to be a commodity, not a currency. ~ Felix Salmon

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't. ~ Theodore Roethke

Prior art is as effective as US soldiers in Iraq: They control the ground they stand on, and nothing more. I used to say Vietnam, but, well, you know ... ~ Richard Stallman

Art is a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born. ~ Edmund Burke

Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration. ~ Clive James

That thought, I can't find the right words, is based not on something negative but on something positive. On the positive awareness that art is something great and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man's soul, while much of the proficiency and technical expertise associated with art reminds me of what would be called self-righteousness in religion. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction. ~ Adrienne Rich

I always think that art is a form of sacrifice. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography. ~ Anonymous

Do books, after all, change anything? For all their proverbial liberalism, have they made the world more liberal? Or have they offered the fig leaf that allows us to go on as we were, liberal in our reading and conservative in our living. Perhaps art is more part of the problem than the solution; we may be going to hell, but look how well we write about it, look at our paintings and operas and tragedies. ~ Tim Parks

Writing, as most art, is considered to be essentially superfluous. Who is an artist before a surgeon? Or a scientist? But the fact that tyrants and political forces of every age have been threatened by art again and again, condemned it as degenerate or poisonous, and have silenced, brutalized, or murdered artists because of their work only serves to illustrate how significant art is, that it is our one greatest power. I would even go so far as to say that the tyrant 'understands' art more than the devotee, for the latter is generally too 'pious' and adoring, almost like a simple-minded believer overwrought by faith who simply loves and finds everything 'great,' whereas the former suffers the transformative threat of art more, is even endangered by it, hence their terror. ~ Rainer J. Hanshe

Art is not meant to change the world, but when you see people interacting, when you see an impact on their lives, then I guess in a smaller way, this is changing the world. So, that's what I believe in. That's why I'm into creating more and more interactions. ~ JR

The Christian Church has put a spiritual hierarchy on jobs. Ministers and missionaries are on top, then perhaps doctors and nurses come next, and so on to the bottom, where artists appear. Artists of whatever kind have to compromise everything to entertain. Art is fluffy froth that is no good in the Kingdom of God. What nonsense. ~ Steve Taylor

All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis. ~ Upton Sinclair