Serious Art Quotes

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

I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart. ~ Twyla Tharp

Cinema is a very difficult and serious art, it requires sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn't belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Too many of these writers in the music papers, they are misunderstanding everything. The disco sound is not art or anything so serious. ~ Giorgio Moroder

So he-we, fiction writers-won't (can't) dare try to use serious art to advance idealogies. 31 (We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies-but this is very different.) The project would be like Menard's Quixote. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this (and it is a given), who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn't (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that? How-for a writer today, even a talented writer today-to get up the guts to event try? There are no formulas or guarantees. There are, however, models. Frank's books make one of them concrete and alive and terribly instructive. ~ David Foster Wallace

TV and popular film and most kinds of 'low' art
which just means art whose primary aim is to make money
is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas 'serious' art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. ~ David Foster Wallace

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic. ~ Roger Ebert

Without rich people who want it done now, who would animate the free world? In theory, you want everyone to live peacefully according to their needs, along the banks of a river. In fact, you worry that you'd die of boredom there. In fact, you get a buzz from someone like Carole Potter, who keeps prize chickens and could teach a graduate course in landscaping; who maintains a staff of four (more in the summers, during High Guest Season); a handsome, slightly ridiculous husband; a beautiful daughter at Harvard and an incorrigible son doing something or other on Bondi Beach; Carole who is charming and self-deprecating and capable, if pushed, of a hostile indifference crueler than any form of rage; who reads novels and goes to movies and theater and yes, yes, bless her, buys art, serious art, about which she actually fucking knows a thing or two. ~ Michael Cunningham

Perhaps ... I mean there are people who defend that it as an art. I don't. I like it but it's not an art form as far as I'm concerned, and yet it's a similar thing, once you can't land those jumps, you're disqualified - that precludes it from ever becoming a serious art form. ~ Mark Morris

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness. ~ Iris Murdoch

The disco sound, you must see, is not art or anything so serious. ~ Giorgio Moroder

In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. ~ Julia Child

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and live, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious? ~ Peter Heller

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious. ~ Lester Bangs

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. ~ Oscar Wilde

All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time. ~ Edward Albee

Serious art is born from serious play. ~ Julia Cameron

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers. ~ Andrei Codrescu

Kitsch is deep in its superficiality. Art is superficially deep. ~ Odd Nerdrum

Art is like a kite. You have to pull the string hard in order to stretch it to its limit, but you don't want to pull it so hard that you break the thread, because the thread connects you to the land and its peoples. ~ Wu Guanzhong

Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties, stays in the same handful of hotels, eats at the same no-star restaurants, and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world, but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking. ~ Jerry Saltz

Knowledge is what shapes us, little brothers," he told them, for once his smile was absent, his tone entirely serious. "It makes us who we are. What we know informs everything we do and every decision we make. ~ Anthony Ryan

Works of art are born of those who confront danger, who go to the limit of an experience, to a point beyond which no human can go. The farther one ventures, the more distinctive, the more personal, the more unique life becomes. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

All art is a confession. ~ Gaston Lachaise

I am concerned with social and environmental issues. What rational person is not? But advocacy and art do not mix. Art is a seduction. Good art invites the reader to think and feel deeply and come to his/her own conclusions. ~ T.C. Boyle

Art, to me, is a question. It should never be an answer. ~ Marilyn Manson

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets. ~ Edward Albee

Fine art is knowledge made visible. ~ Gustave Courbet

The songs are always drawn from personal experience; I'm putting myself into my music. I usually am playing myself. It's art, art that represents my life. ~ Steve Grand

Just as no significant work of art can be created without the element of irrationality that is in fact the artist's talent." p.179
"He wondered if there was a greater distance than the one between two people in the same bed pretending to sleep." p.213 ~ Henning Mankell

Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother. ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman

It's not only music. It's not only art. It's a community. It's a sense of having a place to belong. ~ Jared Leto

Merleau-Ponty's painting inhabits the same rhetoric as early cinema: it makes the invisible visible, or rather it makes visibility visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and invisible world, an order, mode, or aesthetic of visuality. Not only of the small or fast, but of visibility as such. The visuality of the visible and the invisible is found in the mixture of the body and its world, of your body and your world, all your worlds, all your bodies in this world and all those others. Painting is the process by which the visuality of the visible and invisible is made manifest: "Painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings." Each painting is a universal archive, a picture of the universe, a universal image - and like a dream. ~ Akira Mizuta Lippit

I will admit, there are times when I'll react, do it fast and do it on gut. But I lived through some serious shit and I'm still doin' it. I learned you don't carry through with a kneejerk response. You think about shit and you do it smart. Eliminate blowback. Get the shit job done in a way you can move ahead free and easy. ~ Kristen Ashley

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars. ~ Walt Whitman

I was a coat checker, a dishwasher, a waitress, and those were some of the happiest times of my life because I still got to do my writing. You're lucky when you can work and then do your art. ~ Sophie B. Hawkins

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past."
- British Major Ronald Balfour of the Monuments Men ~ Robert M. Edsel

Art is a social object, books and films and records and television shows, they're social objects that bring people together in conversation. I love the notion that I could write something that two people could share. That's the goal. ~ Graham Moore

Finance is the art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager ~ Ambrose Bierce

Return, thou wanderer! Fly back to thy ark, This is not thy home. Think not of building tabernacles here. Thou art but a stranger, a sojourner upon earth; a creature of a day, but just launching out into an unchangeable state. Make haste. Eternity is at hand. Eternity depends on this moment. An eternity of happiness, or an eternity of misery! ~ Michael R. Martin

Politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. ~ George Carlin

With good art, that's what happens - it comes directly out from inside of you almost instinctively. ~ Matt Wagner

True writing is not an art or science but it's an anthem to preach own soul ~ Kunal Jajal

To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing. ~ Robertson Davies

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

But the young sapper was already on his back, the rifle aimed, his eye almost brushing the beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demons until he reached the great face and was stilled by it, the face like a spear, wise, unforgiving. ~ Michael Ondaatje

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. ~ Clive Bell

He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight ~ Sun Tzu

If I hear dance music, my body starts to move. Whatever the dance music is, I can't help it. With all that, I still felt, well, rock is a little higher art, but it wasn't. Right now, because I have so much experience with dance charts, I started to realize that it's incredible art. This is going to be known one day as high art. ~ Yoko Ono

And now there's this. A talent show. Silly and nonsensical. Stupid and fun. Together. Laughing. Being part of the human race. Knowing about the horrors that have happened and will happen but choosing to live anyway. Maybe there's an art to being human. ~ Susan Ee

The irrepressible spirit that made his playing seem like good conversation is the Rubinstein legacy for pianists, if they can pick up their heads from the keyboard long enough to claim it. ~ Donal Henahan

Fear of judgment stifles our ability to embrace uncertainty and as part of that process delivers a serious blow to our willingness to create anything that hasn't already been done and validated. ~ Jonathan Fields

Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises. ~ Tara Brach