Art Objects Quotes

Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen. ~ Charles Simic

Historically, art has always had a market. When one medieval fiefdom defeated another they would drag back its jewels, gold, tapestries and art objects as the spoils of war. Art equaled power, riches and culture. ~ Arne Glimcher

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important. ~ Jacques-Henri Lartigue

What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life. ~ Miuccia Prada

Marshall McLuhan predicted books would become art objects at some point. He was right. ~ Woody Allen

It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them. ~ Man Ray

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art ... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar ... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue. ~ Jeanette Winterson

In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won. ~ W. H. Auden

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art . ~ Robert Smithson

Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force. ~ Vik Muniz

People think, "Wow, people in America have so much money, they're sending hundreds of pencils to this guy." I don't think those people realize that most people who are buying these pencils are buying them as art objects or conversation pieces. ~ David Rees

Postmodernism shifts the basis of the work of art from the object to the transaction between the spectator and the object and further deconstructs this by negating the presence of a representative objective viewer. ~ Arnold Aronson

But all categories of art, idealistic or realistic, surrealistic or constructivist (a new form of idealism) must satisfy a simple test (or they are in no sense works of art): they must persist as objects of contemplation. ~ Herbert Read

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous. ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't want to collect Indian art, though pots and beadwork and blankets made by Indians remain the most beautiful art objects in the American West, in my opinion. ~ Ian Frazier

Anything that is beautiful is beautiful just as it is. Praise forms no part of its beauty, since praise makes things neither better nor worse. This applies even more to what it commonly called beautiful: natural objects, for example, or works of art. True beauty has no need of anything beyond itself. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Art then becomes a safety valve for the expression of individual and collective neuroses originating in the inability of coping with the environment. Its products serve as a retarded correction of perception braked by the system of conventions and stereotypes that stabilize society. They create a slightly updated system which, eventually assimilated by history, will require a new system and so on without end. Art objects serve as points of identification alienated from the consumer, requiring more sympathy than empathy. ~ Luis Camnitzer

I live with the things that I love: art, furniture, and objects that I have collected throughout my travels. ~ Lisa Marie Presley

The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself. ~ G.I. Gurdjieff

TV is a language all its own, a land of one dimensional stereotypes that destroys culture, not adds to it. TV is anti-art, a reflection of consumerism that serves the power structure. TV is about demographics. ~ Roseanne Barr

Art is supposed to tell a story. It is supposed to be a piece of the soul that created it. Art is supposed to be alive, vibrant. It is supposed to speak directly to the spirit. To say things words alone could never say. Art is the essence of being. ~ Joseph R. Lallo

There were relatives of their victims among the Hogwarts students, who now found themselves the unwilling objects of a gruesome sort of reflected fame as they walked the corridors: Susan Bones, whose uncle, aunt, and cousins had all died at the hands of one of the ten, said miserably during Herbology that she now had a good idea what it felt like to be Harry.
"And I don't know how you stand it- it's horrible" she said bluntly. ~ J.K. Rowling

I suppose that Paderewski can play superbly, if not quite at his best, while his thoughts wander to the other end of the world, orpossibly busy themselves with a computation of the receipts as he gazes out across the auditorium. I know a great actor, a master technician, can let his thoughts play truant from the scene ... ~ Minnie Maddern Fiske

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions. ~ Adrienne Rich

Children are like flowers. Let them bloom by giving them your warm smiles, your soft gentle words falling on them like rain and your art of confidence. You will be amazed at your own garden. ~ Abaida Mahmood

I stepped into the martial arts movie market when I was only 16. ~ Jet Li

What I would love to see is art that explicitly addresses not personal intimacies but anonymous intimacies: the vast collections of facts about you and me that now exist in giant server banks. ~ Russell Smith

Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism. ~ Harold Rosenberg

Do you know what good art is? It is saying "ta" to God. ~ Stanley Spencer

A man is fit for neither business nor pleasure, who either cannot, or does not, command and direct his attention to the present object, and, in some degree, banish for that time all other objects from his thoughts. ~ Philip Dormer Stanhope

The two most potent post-war orthodoxies
socialist politics and modernist art
have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man. ~ Roger Scruton

Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great. ~ Ikue Mori

And now too late, we see these things are one:
The art is sacrifice and self-control
And who loves beauty must be stern of soul. ~ Alice Duer Miller

The most complex object in the known universe: brain, only uses 20 watts of power. It would require a nuclear power plant to energize a computer the size of a city block to mimic your brain, and your brain does it with just 20 watts. So if someone calls you a dim bulb, that's a compliment. ~ Michio Kaku

When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That, of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still, while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain, and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable. ~ Mark Twain

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. ~ Ernest Becker

The exact orbit of Earth is controlled by the Sun's mass and the mass of all remaining planets. An object's mass and its distance is all we need to know to completely determine the effects of its gravity on Earth. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. ~ C. G. Jung

We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit. ~ Paul Goodman

To the feudal aristocracy and the aristocracy of the spirit, nobility derives from diametrically opposite sources. The glory of the feudal aristocrat is in being a link in the longest possible chain of ancestors. The glory of the aristocrat of the spirit is in having no ancestors - or having as few as possible. If an artist is his own ancestor, if he has only descendents, he enters history as a genius; if he has few ancestors, or is related to them distantly, he enters history as a talent. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art. ~ Arne Jacobsen

A good half of the art of living is resilience. ~ Alain De Botton

The only damn thing I ever learned in all my years in art school was a piece is never done, it is just finished. You have to trust your inner voice, your instincts, when they tell you pencils down. And you roll up your sleeves and you start over again. ~ Brian Michael Bendis

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

They change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us. ~ Horace

When we rejoice in beautiful scenery, great art, and great music, it is but the flexing of instincts acquired in another place and another time. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty - statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I studied acting for 10 years before I went for an audition. I studied with Lee Strasberg and Actors Studio teachers, and went to the High School of Performing Arts. ~ Ellen Barkin

I'm for mechanical art. When I took up silk screening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through the commercial techniques of multiple reproduction. ~ Andy Warhol

Nordenson describes wrestling with work as with a large force that wants to have its way with you, even as you want to have your way with it. This wrestling, sinewy and particular as its wrestler, enlarges us as we read our way into her life with its incisive insights and explorations. Can one wrestle meditatively? This author has learned the art and we are the benefactors. ~ Luci Shaw

Those who still think that listening isn't an art should see if they can do it half as well. ~ Michael Ende

ART: None. The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn't a mirror big enough - see point one. ~ Douglas Adams

The noblest art is that of making others happy ~ P.T. Barnum

People don't buy lady art. ~ Walter Keane

Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all. ~ Leo Tolstoy

He'd discovered the tables now and was staring at the pile. It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Sasha's eye, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration. It contained years of her life compressed. The screwdriver was at the outer edge. Sasha moved closer to Alex, drawn to the sight of him taking everything in. ~ Jennifer Egan

A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored. ~ Karl Kraus

You know, there used to be a difference between authentic music and sellout music. I'm talking about when I was young, in the sixties? Back then we knew there was a soullessness to the sellouts, and we wanted to be on the side of the artists. But now? Being a sellout is the authentic thing. When Molly Miller says 'I'm just being real,' what she means is that everyone wants money and fame and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. the only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That's the new authenticity. Molly Miler can never be accused of selling out because selling out was her goal all along. ~ Nathan Hill

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time. ~ Virginia Woolf

Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to nurture artistic talent. Any parent with a hard hand can crush it, but to nurture it is much more difficult. ~ Stephen King

The art of land warfare is an art of genius, of inspiration. On the sea nothing is genius or inspiration; everything is positive or empiric. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

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

It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from him, sketch from him. Of course I have done all that. But he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. I won't tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that Art cannot express it. There is nothing that Art cannot express, and I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work, is the best work of my life ~ Oscar Wilde