The Art Quotes

When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that.

Suddenly I've got an overwhelming desire to surround myself with the aura of classical and Romantic art.

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for any one but inspire them?

The work of art is an ostentatiously improbable occurrence.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no line between high art and pop art, and there should be no line.

I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

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.

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Art is not a career - it's a life.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

Comprehensibility is the highest law of all. Unity must be there. There must be means of ensuring it. All the things familiar to us from primitive life must also be used in works of art.

The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects.

All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer.

I'd love to go to art school. I'd love to learn how to draw. I'd love to be fluent in Spanish. I'd like to be a brain surgeon.

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.

I started studying as an artist, but I got fed up with the fact that you can paint terrible pictures and if you explain them in an erudite way it's called great art. I thought this was rubbish.

Art is mainly about wrestling with material reality, not striving after a spiritual ideal.

But as I see it, the most corrupt art is the sentimental the art of orange blossoms which make pale women swoon.

I think most people agree there is a component of skill in art making; you have to learn grammar before you learn how to write.

Art is something to be proud of. Art is no compromise.

I'm interested in pressure, I'm interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn't always look the same.

All art is image making and all image making is the creation of substitutes.

When it comes to fashion or any high art, you have to have a combination of delicacy, along with taste.

Art is eternal, but life is short..I will make up for it now, I have not a moment to lose.

Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.

The highest art is artlessness.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

Leo's goals are works of art.

Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.

Art is the great stimulus to life.

I found myself in my first art school under the direction of Robert Henri... My life began at this point.

The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist's own spiritual nature.

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.

My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it.

Advocating through art is known as propaganda. You should look up the name Goebbels.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

I like nature but not its substitutes... Mondrian opposed art to nature saying that art is artificial and nature is natural. I do not share this opinion... Art's origins are natural.