Art Quotes

Art is good but it isn't the best.

Art does not imitate life. Art is much more powerful than that. Art brings life back. And it does it by exposing the secrets we all carry inside.

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.

Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations.

Art is prayer - not the vulgarized notations handed down to us in the scriptures, but a fresh vital discovery of one's own special presence in the world.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

Everybody's an art critic.

Art is one of the few careers without a mandatory retirement age.

Art is a spiritual practice. We may not, and need not, do it perfectly.

Making art is an act of faith.

Making art is a rite of initiation. People change their souls.

There are only fools who believe that art is a serious matter.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.

Speaking out and creating art that truly reflects the world we live in goes part of the way towards doing that. At least that's what I hope.

I'm extremely critical. I don't consider myself a performance artist. I balk at the term performance art.

I realized [using my own voice] is what creates the performance in the performance art and that's what helps creates the distance for the viewers, like the distance that I get when I step back.

Even though the art world goes through trends, you do know that it'll come up again.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

Many with careers in the art world are intimidated, and afraid to speak out against the gospels of Modernist theory.

When I traveled through Greece in the '90s, everything [Albert Hoxie] taught me came flooding back and I was able to appreciate the art and culture much more because of him.

During the Renaissance, women were not allowed to attend art school. Everyone asks, where are the great women painters of the Renaissance?

Art is only abstract when you look the other way.

Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.

I always wanted to be a doctor and go to art school, but I thought Id regret it if I didnt act.

Teaching is performance art.

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.

Just because you're wearing a goofy hat doesn't make it performance art.

My soul is a canvas stretched across four wooden corners and tacked with copper nails that sink into the edges of timber like teeth. My art is nothing less than my salvation.

The greatest art is philosophy.

This is - it's a sociological experiment in many ways. And so you're seeing the results of what happens when you put a lot of boys in a room looking at art history.

I think it was a matter of, like, I'm not going to have my kids in these wild streets. Both my twin brother and I were in art school together.

I was 11 when I was first introduced to live drawing classes and going to art school.

After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries.

I don't think rock n' roll songwriters should worry about art. I don't think it comes into it...as far as I'm concerned, Art is just short for Arthur.

I have never been sorry to see my sets being struck, provided they are well photographed. They're not works of art but part of making a film.

Art is the most benign cultural practice, and yet art has an upper bound of personal revelation that is so far away it is basically a horizon.

Art is a necessity, an essential part of our enlightenment process.

If it's good art, it's good.

Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.

What I'm doing in writing has been thoroughly and exhaustively explored in other fields like visual art, music, and cinema, yet somehow it's never really been tested on the page.

God is good but not safe, and the urge for safe art is often a worldly temptation away from goodness.

Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.

Arts education must be part of our education solution because it works for all students.

I suppose it’s true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. “M.A.S.H.” comes to mind. So does The Iliad.

The best art on a football field usually happens during kickoff returns.

Art is a step in the known toward the unknown