Art World Quotes

The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much the heart of the world they've created on film. ~ Howard Shore

( ... ) 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

Harry, despite your privileged insight into Voldemort's world (which, incidentally, is a gift any Death Eater would kill to have), you have never been seduced by the Dark Arts, never, even for a second, shown the slightest desire to become one of Voldemort's followers!"
"Of course I haven't!" said Harry indignantly. "He killed my mum and dad!"
"You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!" said Dumbledore loudly. ~ J.K. Rowling

I'm making art and making decisions and editing things. I don't live my life to broadcast it into the art world; I don't see it as my life on the stage. ~ Frances Stark

I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists. ~ Kim Gordon

When I met Steve Kaufman, I thought he was Gene Simmons, but what an artist talent he is. He will be an art force in the art world to deal with. ~ Roy Lichtenstein

When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event. ~ Jerry Saltz

I'll never understand the art world. But I kind of feel like there's been some art world/black metal crossovers happening for a while. ~ Mick Barr

One of the biggest things happening in the art world is this idea of expansion. No one embodies this aspect of what art is becoming better than James Franco. ~ Jeffrey Deitch

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process. ~ Brian Eno

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Make an enemy of jealousy and envy. As fast and soon as you can ... . The art world is high school with money. ~ Jerry Saltz

Painting is a form of incarnation. It is spirit made manifest in the world. ~ Jeffrey Smart

I am sure that there is no place in the world where your message would not be enhanced by your making the place (whether tiny or large, a hut or a palace) orderly, artistic and beautiful with some form of creativity, some form of 'art' (p. 213). ~ Edith Schaeffer

For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.
(on commenting the text of Genesis 1:6) ~ John Calvin

It is unfeeling to speak of the people who cooperate in the production of art works as "personnel" or, worse yet, "support personnel", but that accurately reflects their importance in the conventional art world view. In that view, the person who does the "real work", making the choices that give the work its artistic importance and integrity, is the artist, who may be any of a number of people involved in its production, everyone else's job is to assist. I do not accept the view of the relative importance of the "personnel" involved that the term connotes, but i use it to emphasize that it is the common view in art worlds ~ Howard S. Becker

I have been using polka dots since I was a very young child. Only after that, it seems, have they been used throughout the rest of the art world. ~ Yayoi Kusama

Why settle for the art world when you can have the whole world? ~ Martin Firrell

I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography. ~ John Waters

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal. ~ Steven Pinker

It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you. ~ Douglas Coupland

I celebrated success in the art world, which was quite sudden, and I suddenly had $1,000 a month, when formerly I had nothing, basically. So what we did with this money: we had a baby, we bought a car, and we celebrated by going to Rome, because it would be warmer and better looking. ~ Peter Saul

I think when people struggle with the problem of trying to understand the art world as an idea, they misunderstand it. They think it's a world of visionaries or opportunists. But it also includes people who want to take part in this cultural exercise but don't have the required stuff, they don't have the ideas or the production. ~ Liam Gillick

The only way to survive is to intently focus on how the art world operates. Once you understand how things work, you can find a solution to the problems you are facing. ~ Mark Edward

I'm enamored with the art world. ~ Steve Martin

The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art. ~ Harold Rosenberg

The arts, it has been said, cannot change the world, but they may change human beings who might change the world. ~ Maxine Greene

A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers. ~ Jerry Saltz

The contemporary art world is what Tom Wolfe would call a "statusphere." It's structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affliction, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attribution such as the size of one's art collection. ~ Sarah Thornton

When I was a kid and started to be obsessed by art in the 1980s, the art world was in this polarity Warhol/Beuys, Beuys/Warhol. Both expended the notion of art extremely, but in very different ways. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

In some respects I will never die. Because art is immortal. What we leave behind and what we create - the energy that we put out into the world is eternal. ~ Madonna Ciccone

Although the art world is frequently characterised as a classless scene where artists from lower-msddle-class backgrounds drink champagne with high-priced hedge-fund managers, scholarly curators, fashion designers and other "creatives," you'd be mistaken if you thought the world was egalitarian or democratic. Art is about experimenting with ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it's an intoxicating combination. ~ Sarah Thornton

The art world is a jungle echoing to the calls of vicious jealousies and ruthless combat between dealers and collectors; but I have been walking in the jungles of business all my life, and fighting tooth and nail for pictures comes as a form of relaxation to me. ~ Armand Hammer

Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish. ~ Francois Rabelais

Images cluttered the pages, but one tattoo set her nerves on edge; inky black eyes surrounded by wings likes shadows coalescing.
Mine. The thought, the need,
the reaction was overpowering.
Leslie looked up. "This one." she said. "I need this one.
But the image is more than just tempting art, and it draws her into a world of shadows and desire- into the world of Faerie. ~ Melissa Marr

I've been slagged off completely by the art world. ~ Tracey Emin

We tend to mix genders when we arrange ourselves around a table for meetings. A sort of accommodation is made by the men for the women: they make space for us. they are ever-so-slightly polite, we are ever-so-slightly grateful. When we stand up at the end of a meeting, we all give ourselves a metaphorical shake that is only partly the relief of having concluded our business: we are all released from the effort of fitting ourselves together.
When men speak in these meetings, women relax; when women speak, men grow tense. I have the impression that they never know what a woman is going to say, whereas they are reasonably sure what a man will address himself to and how he will do it. So are the women; for them, too, men tend to be predictable. Women listen to women with a different kind of attention, and part of it may be loyalty to our gender; we want all of us to do well, as if we have the esprit de corps of subalterns among generals. ~ Anne Truitt

The art world was not initially really accepting my kind of work. I was ahead of my time. ~ Yoko Ono

I am not a specialist but a general practitioner in the world of the arts. ~ Theodore Bikel

Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money. ~ Jerry Saltz

From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance. ~ Jeffrey Deitch

The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting. ~ Jerry Saltz

The world of painting has nothing to do with the art world. ~ Caio Fonseca

Coping with rejection is an important skill to learn and understand when navigating the Art World. Rejection and disinterest is the rule, not the exception. ~ Paul Russo

I would love to collect [art] at some point, but I think the whole rap/art world thing is getting kind of corny. ~ Drake

I would say being deeply involved in the art world would help keep a young artist on track. Doing what you love, so that your focus is your artistry. ~ Jada Pinkett Smith

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it. ~ Rachel Kushner

I like that the art world isn't regulated. ~ Jerry Saltz

Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life. ~ Robert Adams

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Some people in the art world bemoan the hedge fund millionaires spending freely to acquire ostentatious displays of wealth and coolth for their giddily chic designer duplexes. Others bemoan art being treated as a commodity. But most of the bemoaning is because the art world is stuffed full of bemoaners, bemoaning about everything. ~ Charles Saatchi

Kahn once said, The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it. ~ Robert Hughes

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings. ~ Jerry Saltz

The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~ Pablo Picasso

There are many, many art worlds. Art contains multitudes. ~ Jerry Saltz

The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world. ~ Huston Smith

When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave. ~ John Cage

To be honest, I think, for me, the power is always with art. The art world clearly couldn't happen without art. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily. ~ Alain De Botton

The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world. ~ Michael Leunig

[Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it ... ) ~ Vito Acconci

The art world is a very prissy little thing over in the corner, while the major cultural forces are being determined by techno science. ~ Natalie Jeremijenko

What the art world has done, it has been constantly been pushing the boundaries about what art can be. It's like expanding its territory. ~ Tom Rachman

The physical world is too good a gift to be reduced to an object lesson about 'spiritual things'. ~ Kenneth Myers

She doesn't attend gallery openings or apear at art-world parties. "People need to see the work. It's more me than my physical presence. ~ Jan Greenberg

In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it. ~ Andre Malraux

I love art dealers. In some ways, they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is, create their own aesthetic universes, support artists, employ people, and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries. ~ Jerry Saltz

Penny Arcade said: At that time, the DRUG world and the ART world ran through each other. (1971 - 1974) ~ Legs McNeil

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog. ~ Friedrich Von Schlegel

The greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling, ~ Cecil B. DeMille

Many outsiders see the art world as elitist and it is, except it is also oddly down-to-earth and embracing of oddballs who don't fit in well anywhere else. ~ Sarah Thornton

Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it. ~ Rene Magritte

I do think that drugs and alcohol have been glorified and exoticized in such a way that it gets into the art world. ~ Heath Ledger

The art world seems so much bigger than it was when I was growing up. ~ China Chow

More people than ever are spending money to support more artists and musicians and give them more leisure time to build cereal balls ... and the art world is eating those balls up! ~ Brian Chippendale

I think the art world will continue to be a place where people have a certain freedom and creativity to think about what's happening in Cuba. ~ Rachael Price

The entertainment industry, the advertising industry have taken [the] tools from the art world and made themselves much more politically potent. We are really devastated and very impotent right now. A photographer just working for an advertising company has a platform to be much more politically effective in the world than an artist. ~ Jeff Koons

It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall. Most people who create, trade and own art do it for a much simpler reason. They just like it. ~ Adam Davidson

Art in the art world, and culture in general, are branches of the media, which produces our political and social thinking climate. ~ Hans Haacke

Life doesn't just happen; it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially, with a leftist slant, to work out how we got here. ~ Mike Mills

I quite like it to be risky. I'm not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet. I've arrived at that point in the art world where there really is a chair that you sit in. ~ Damien Hirst

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you
whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others
not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art. ~ Dorianne Laux

I think what art is always doing is making us see the world so differently, and I don't mean just colors and light, but re-thinking relationships, spatial relationships, psychological relationships ... those who gravitate to the art world actually want to be puzzled. ~ Roselee Goldberg

I am a firm believer that digital imaging has already rivaled the chemical process in its ability to make fine prints. An exceptional digital print, on a fine quality paper, can take on all the delicacy of a masterful photogravure. Each is, after all, ink on paper. The unfortunate thing is that skillful digital fine art photography is being created by so few, and today's artworld is brimming with hastily made, conceptually oriented, digital bric-a-brac. ~ Waswo X. Waswo

The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny. ~ Rachel Kushner

The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism. ~ Claes Oldenburg

When I was looking at the Russian Constructivists, these agitprop artists actually painted on trains. It was a heavy influence. They were bringing art to the people, to the masses, and breaking it out of the clubbiness of the art world, which is a monolith. ~ Jeffrey Deitch

I realized that I wasn't naturally born to good taste. I understand what it is, but I am happy to wear bright colors. I do have a few items of black clothing, but I think good taste and doing the same thing over and over again is what the whole art world has become. ~ Jim Shaw

The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis. ~ Andre Malraux

The issue is Kinkade's ideology, and particularly his nostalgia; his paintings endlessly trumpet a nonexistent past when times were simpler and morality more pure. There's nothing wrong with this, but it stands at odds with a contemporary art world that looks to the future for inspiration. We value complexity and innovation, and distrust saccharine pictures of the past. ~ Paddy Johnson

With all its excesses, the modern impressionistic movement has given us one discovery, the color violet. It is the only discovery of importance in the art world since Velazquez. ~ Joaquin Sorolla

While other industries have suffered, the nonprofit arts world continues to build in strength while it encourages the growth of innumerable small businesses on its periphery, thereby creating more jobs. ~ Louise Slaughter

I think rap definitely has its place in the art world. I think it is an art form. But, just like any art form, you can misuse it. ~ Rick James

I never thought, "I'm going to be an artist". When I actually began to become successful in the art world I made it a point to say, 'I am a dilettante, I am not a professional artist", which is true. ~ Yoko Ono

Whatever man may stand, whatever he may do, to whatever he may apply his hand - in agriculture, in commerce, and in industry, or his mind, in the world of art, and science - he is, in whatsoever it may be, constantly standing before the face of God. He is employed in the service of his God. He has strictly to obey his God. And above all, he has to aim at the glory of his God. ~ Abraham Kuyper

I feel the art world in New York has a stronger following than Britain. If you go to a New York art district on a Saturday morning, it will be so busy with families and openings - art is much more ingrained in the culture. ~ Sam Taylor-Wood

A great director gives life to a work of art- gives it a heartbeat… a pulse… opens its eyes to the world. ~ A.D. Posey

I like the idea of multidisciplinary conversations, so in that spirit, I try and make a contribution from the art world into the music world. ~ Fred Tomaselli