Feminist Art Quotes

Feminist art may ... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme ... should we call it 'joy'? ~ Andrea Dworkin

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to. ~ Frida Kahlo

I didn't like anti-Vietnam War art. I didn't like feminist art. I thought it was heavy-handed and stupid - as art. ~ Robert Barry

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. ~ Andrea Dworkin

I never made "feminist art," and if I did it was not deliberate ... ~ Michelle Stuart

The work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff. ~ Cindy Sherman

I do write about men now and then, but I mostly write about women because that's the work I like best. When I became a feminist, I realized that somebody had to write all about this women's art that was out there ignored, and it was going to be me. And of course the ideas were particularly interesting to me, and the discoveries, about what women's art was and could be. I often say I'm more interested and mediocre art by women than in mediocre art by men – which is interpreted as I only like mediocre art or women only do mediocre art – all that shit. I don't write about mediocre art but I look at it and it does interest me for the information it gives me about women's imagery, women's psyches, women's lives, women's experience. ~ Lucy R. Lippard

The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament. ~ Andre Gide

Punk's influence on music, movies, art, design and fashion is no longer in doubt. It is used as the measurement for what is cool. ~ Malcolm McLaren

W- Work of Art
A- Achiever
R- Resilient
R- Radical
I- Independent
O- Organized
R- Resourceful ~ Shannon L. Alder

Making an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology ... Art is anything that you can do well. Anything that you can do with Quality. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Whoever said dogs can't speak was never interested in learning another language. ~ Mark Winik

I didn't do great in school. I didn't have many options. I mean, I'd like to have gone to art college, but I didn't have the grades. I didn't have any qualifications. But I had some friends who were hairdressers, so I just thought, Well, I'll have a go at it. ~ Guido Palau

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker. ~ David Bowie

Form follows emotion ~ Walter Isaacson

All passes, Art alone Enduring stays to us; The Bust out-lasts the throne,
The coin, Tiberius. ~ Henry Austin Dobson

The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel. ~ Teju Cole

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Art is the image of life, it's purpose simply to enhance it. ~ Julian Casablancas

I think as soon as I figured out - and this must have been incredibly young - that comic books were made by humans, rather than being natural phenomenon likes trees or rocks, I just wanted to be one of the people who did that. So I was copying all kinds of cartoons that I was reading, comic books, and eventually learned how to draw cartoon books step-by-step and just, I don't know, I'm not an especially quick learner, but I sure was a dedicated one. ~ Art Spiegelman

Backpacking is the art of knowing what not to take. ~ Sheridan Anderson

Nefertiti Speaks:
Sands of time released my ancient image
to awaken you to the artistry and splendour
of Egypt's Camelot

No mystery am I
A modern woman trapped in an old time

Go forward beautiful ladies and create
new worlds of artistry and beauty
out of the sands of time ~ Ramon Ravenswood

Are his letters to Diana downstairs?"
She sighed. "What is it about girls and letters? My husband left me messages in soap on the bathroom mirror. Utterly impermanent.Really wonderful-" She broke off and scowled. I would have thought she looked a little embarrassed, but I didn't think embarrassment was in her repertoire. "Anyway. Most of the correspondence between the Willings is in private collections. He had their letters with him in Paris when he died. In a noble but ultimately misguided act, his attorney sent them to his neice. Who put them all in a ghastly book that she illustrated. Her son sold them to finance the publication of six even more ghastly books of poetry. I trust there is a circle of hell for terrible poets who desecrate art."
"I've seen the poetry books in the library," I told her. "The ones with Edward's paintings on the covers. I couldn't bring myself to read them."
"Smart girl. I suppose worse things have been done, but not many.Of course, there was that god-awful children's television show that made one of his landscapes move.They put kangaroos in it. Kangaroos. In eastern Pennsylvania."
"I've seen that,too," I admitted. I'd hated it. "Hated it.Not quite as much as the still life where Tastykakes replaced one orange with a cupcake, or the portrait of Diana dressed in a Playtex sports bra, but close."
"Oh,God. I try to forget about the bra." Dr. Rothaus shuddered. "Well, I suppose they do far worse to the really famous painters.P ~ Melissa Jensen

Culture is the intersection between people and dealing with the journey of life itself. How to deal with life, how a people deals with life is literally manifested in its culture, in its food, in its music, in its art, in the way you dance, the way you communicate. ~ Wendell Pierce

Now smiling had been something almost alien to me just a few weeks ago. But over this short period of time, I had rediscovered this art thanks to that noble emotion of love. Joy that had been bottled up inside since childhood now overcame me from deep within just like the healing water reaching folks at hot springs from regions deep below the surface. ~ Vivek Pereira

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work. ~ Eduardo Chillida

I paint in order not to cry. ~ Paul Klee

Funny thing, falling in love. You can't quite explain the difference between this--kissing the girl you love, having sex with the girl you love--and all the kissing and all the sex that came before. You can't describe the difference between her flesh and that flesh, her hips and their hips, her gasp and those gasps. You can't parse the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the experience, the units that make up the whole, any more than you, the untrained viewer, can explain why the Mona Lisa is the Mona fucking Lisa. You just stand back and take it in and say, Wow, so this is art. You lie back in your bed, you hold her next to your chest, her ribs next to your ribs, her breath and your breath, and you say, So this is love. ~ Beatriz Williams

Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil, or it's all been done before? Make good art. ~ Neil Gaiman

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty ~ John F. Kennedy

There must not be a canon of orthodoxy where art is judged and measured. The culture cannot move forward with our heads turned backwards. ~ Paul Russo

Men who are ill-natured and quarrelsome when drunk are very worthy persons when sober. For drink in reality doth not reverse nature or create passions in men which did not exist in them before. It takes away the guard of reason and consequently forces us to produce those symptoms which many when sober have art enough to conceal. ~ Henry Fielding

People ask about art and commercialism. I think that if someone tries to sell their work at a high price, that is the wrong way of doing it. ~ Yayoi Kusama

Every art and every faculty contemplates certain things as its principal objects. ~ Epictetus

Being a systematic theologian allows me to indulge all my interests - in literature, film, art, music - by relating them all to God. ~ Kevin Vanhoozer

As artists, the pleasure is to really have your work resonate and mean something. Art takes its inspiration from reality. ~ Yareli Arizmendi

This is what I call participation in the world of ideas. That is what art-making is. ~ Bill T. Jones

I want art that makes the world seem more unreal. I want fiction that can crumble the world and build it back into something new. ~ Lincoln Michel

Changi became my university instead of my prison ... Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life - the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving. ~ James Clavell

Men did care enough to struggle with our demands. And some cared enough to convert to feminist thinking and to change. But only a very, very few loved us – loved us all the way. And that meant respecting our sexual rights. To this day I believe that feminist debate about love and sexuality ended precisely because straight women did not want to face the reality that it was highly unlikely in patriarchal society that a majority of men would wholeheartedly embrace women's right to say no in the bedroom. Since the vast majority of heterosexual women, even those involved in radical feminist movement, were not willing to say no when they did not want to perform sexually for the fear of upsetting or alienating their mate, no significant group of men ever had to rise to the occasion. While it became more acceptable to say no now and then, it was not acceptable to say no for any significant amount of time. An individual woman in a primary relationship with a man could not say no, because she feared there was always another woman in the background who could take her place, a woman who would never say no. ~ Bell Hooks

Art educates. That's why writers must know life ... If the writer knows life, his work is often progressive, even though his own consciousness may lag behind. ~ Slawomir Mrozek

I wish people would understand that comedy is an art form, and that the same thing that makes a Picasso painting is the same thing that gives Bill Cosby the ability to do an hour of comedy on his kids. ~ Godfrey

If it is art, it is not for all.
If it is for all, it is not art. ~ Schoenberg

The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage. ~ Geoff Dyer

The art of clinical diagnosis lies in the ability to ask the right questions. ~ Harriet B. Braiker

A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology ... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes. ~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master. ~ David Hume

Write as an audience member. Write what you want to see, feel and hear. ~ Carol Hovsepian

What of Art?
-It is a malady.
Love?
-An Illusion.
Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
What are you?
-To define is to limit. ~ Oscar Wilde