Critical Art Quotes

Critical art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes: first, the production of a sensory form of 'strangeness'; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness. ~ Jacques Ranciere

The future belongs to us. I think that art is a force that can change the world. ~ Shahin Najafi

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

more to be a human being with ~ Gary D. Schmidt

There, I feel once again that I shall really express myself, shall bring the words to bay. Alas, no one taught me this kind of chase, and the ancient inborn art of writing is long since forgotten - forgotten are the days when it needed no schooling, but ignited and blazed like a forest fire - today it seems just as incredible as the music that once used to be extracted from a monstrous pianoforte, music that would nimbly ripple or suddenly hack the world into great, gleaming blocks - I myself picture all this so clearly, but you are not I, and therein lies the irreparable calamity. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

After that I jumped, especially being in art school, to the illustrators. ~ Bill Sienkiewicz

Julia had a friend, a man named Dennys, who was as a boy a tremendously gifted artist. They had been friends since they were small, and she once showed me some of the drawings he made when he was ten or twelve: little sketches of birds pecking at the ground, of his face, round and blank, of his father, the local veterinarian, his hand smoothing the fur of a grimacing terrier. Dennys's father didn't see the point of drawing lessons, however, and so he was never formally schooled. But when they were older, and Julia went to university, Dennys went to art school to learn how to draw. For the first week, he said, they were allowed to draw whatever they wanted, and it was always Dennys's sketches that the professor selected to pin up on the wall for praise and critique.
But then they were made to learn how to draw: to re-draw, in essence. Week two, they only drew ellipses. Wide ellipses, fat ellipses, skinny ellipses. Week three, they drew circles: three-dimensional circles, two-dimensional circles. Then it was a flower. Then a vase. Then a hand. Then a head. Then a body. And with each week of proper training, Dennys got worse and worse. By the time the term had ended, his pictures were never displayed on the wall. He had grown too self-conscious to draw. When he saw a dog now, its long fur whisking the ground beneath it, he saw not a dog but a circle on a box, and when he tried to draw it, he worried about proportion, not about recording its doggy-ness. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost! ~ Henry James

Art thou afraid to be the same in act and valor as thou art in desire ~ William Shakespeare

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art. ~ Ernest Rutherford

You got blood on your face, you big disgrace, waving your banner all over the place. ~ Queen Elizabeth II

architecture is an art of the mind that will display in front of the eyes from others which can satisfy their needs ~ Jan Jansen

Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle. ~ Arthur Koestler

A boy in the schoolyard handing out the very same love-letter to a bunch of girls. This is what I think of 'limited editions' in art photography. ~ AtheARTIST

...normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory-in Appalachia in particular-of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again. ~ John Hodgman

Artists are free to push boundaries to make art. But when pushing boundaries is their only aim, the result is usually bad art. ~ Jane Lynch

Dance is the language of artistic kinesis. ~ Pablito Greco

And whether it is equal pay, health care, Social Security, or family leave, this Congress has refused to address issues critical to hard-working American women. ~ Louise Slaughter

There's also an immediacy to everything that has changed everybody's expectations. Now if I can't get a hold of somebody on their cell phone I'm, like, angry with them. And in my mind, all the things that I really value in terms of art, really good novels or films or comics, I know they all take a long, long time to create, and they take a lot of concentration and dedication ... and I just feel like the training for that is becoming more and more rare when people are used to seeing things like YouTube clips, and being able to acquire things instantly. ~ Adrian Tomine

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality. ~ Simon Schama

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

Christian art, like obscene art, is surface level. ~ Anonymous

Do lifelong artists pay a price for having chosen to make art? Of course. Everyone pays the price for his or her choices. ~ Sally Warner

I lived right on the borderline of a black neighborhood. So I could go into the black area and then there'd be these ghetto theaters that you could actually see the new kung fu movie or the new blaxploitation movie or the new horror film or whatever. And then there was also, if you went just a little further away, there was actually a little art house cinema. So I could actually see, you know, French movies or Italian movies, when they came out. ~ Quentin Tarantino

It's like I'm married to the silencer,
Until I file for divorce and release my ex-calibers.
Do art with your arteries, place that for my adversaries,
Put your snap back cap back, cap your capillaries. ~ Pharoahe Monch

Why we write.
Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless. Because art's lie is preferable, in truth, to life's beautiful terror. Because as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes) it passes the time. Because Death, our mirthless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs. Because epitaphs well struck give Death, our vorcious master, heartburn. Because fiction imitates life's beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks. Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world. Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it. Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child. Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks. Because God, created in the storyteller's image, can be destroyed only by its maker. Because in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious, and because in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life. Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood. Because in the beginning was the gesture and in the end the come, as well in between what we have are words. Because of all arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men. Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretentions. Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow upon (it must be said) no surface. Because the world is reinvented every day and this is how it is done. Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression. ~ Robert Coover

Art is for everybody. ~ Keith Haring

Art is a Verb, not a Noun. ~ Ernest West Basden

Art was something that I was really interested in, probably more so than writing or anything else. ~ Robert Barry

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

Duchamp had taken art to its logical conclusion.
Every act of perception is art.
So everything that perceives is an artist. ~ Chris F. Westbury

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. ~ Randall Jarrell

The wonderful poems interpreting with equal magic the romance of strange lands and times, or the modern soul, naked and unashamed, as if clothed in its own complexity; the humorous-tragic questionings of the universe; the delicious travel-pictures and fantasies; the lucid criticisms of art, and politics, and philosophy, informed with malicious wisdom, shimmering with poetry and wit. ~ Israel Zangwill

And you seek pain like it is pleasure
Like a work of art
When I'm your painting, I'm your treasure
Purest of them all
And call it love or call it murder
Kill me quietly
Close the door then take it further
Where no man has been ~ Lykke Li

So the emergence of art as Art creates room to expand unbelief; unbelief has somewhere to go without settling for the mechanism of a completely flattened universe but also without returning to a traditional religion that is now implausible. ~ James K.A. Smith

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother's milk and blackens it to make printer's ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist's work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creatio ~ George Bernard Shaw

As discussed earlier, when it comes to music, most of us tend to have confidence in our taste even though we may totally lack knowledge regarding historical development or compositional theory. I frequently hear, "I don't know anything about art" but hardly ever, "I don't know anything about music". ~ Michael Findlay

Tyranny brings ignorance and brutality with it. It degrades men from their just rank into the class of brutes; it damps their spirits; it suppresses art; it extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and generosity in the breasts of those who are enslaved by it; it makes naturally strong and great minds feeble and little, and triumphs over the ruins of virtue and humanity. ~ Jonathan Mayhew

The scenic vistas of North Carolina and Tennessee make you feel like you're looking at a work of art, but crossing through the rural countryside of southwest Virginia and caressing the tall grass with your fingertips, you feel like you're part of the painting. ~ Jennifer Pharr Davis

In families one can't choose one's siblings. Within regions one doesn't choose one's neighbors. And if you are one of the world's leading producers of a critical industrial resource like copper, in the end you can't really choose your customers. China and Zambia will just have to get along. ~ Howard W. French

Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight
distortion that is the mark of both art and protest. Whether it is the enlargement of the microscope which
Proust brings to bear on human experience or, on the contrary, the absurd insignificance with which the
American novel endows its characters, reality is in some way artificial. The creative force, the fecundity
of rebellion, are contained in this distortion which the style and tone of a work represent. Art is an
impossible demand given expression and form. When the most agonizing protest finds its most resolute
form of expression, rebellion satisfies its real aspirations and derives creative energy from this fidelity to
itself. Despite the fact that this runs counter to the prejudices of the times, the greatest style in art is the
expression of the most passionate rebellion. Just as genuine classicism is only romanticism subdued,
genius is a rebellion that has created its own limits. That is why there is no genius, contrary to what we
are taught today, in negation and pure despair. ~ Albert Camus

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804) ~ Benjamin Constant

More and more, cultural groups are cross-pollinating, and we're getting much more interesting art as a result. ~ Damon Albarn

Unlike other reformers, Luther rarely claimed divine inspiration for his ideas. It is interesting too that he uses the word Kunst - art - for it suggests that the insight, like the skill of a craftsman or artist, opened up a whole new ability to accomplish things in a different way. ~ Lyndal Roper

Some of the reviewers wanted less. Some wanted lots more. Some wanted lots more of something else. But these strips are exactly what they are. ~ Art Spiegelman

El duende is literally the goblin wind or force behind a person's actions and creative life, including the way they walk, the sound of their voice, even the way they lift their little finger. It is a term used in flamenco dance, and is also used to describe the ability to "think" in poetic images. Among Latina curanderas who recollect story, it is understood as the ability to be filled with spirit that is more than one's own spirit. Whether one is the artist or whether one is the watcher, listener, or reader, when el duende is present, one sees it, hears it, reads it, feels it underneath the dance, the music, the words, the art; one knows it is there. When el duende is not present, one knows that too. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s. ~ Camille Paglia

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first. ~ Cesare Pavese