The Art Quotes

I think we cannot have a double standard. We cannot see our art as different from the reality. We cannot use two different sets of judgment.

[Shanghai Biennale] has been my attitude for as long as I've been practicing art and other cultural-related activities.

In China, we don't have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn't even have a gallery.

All the rich people collect traditional Chinese art. So it's very natural for Chinese families to still see art as the highest human performance and send their children to this field.

My work is always a ready-made... cultural, political, or social, and also it could be art - to make people re-look at what we have done, its original position, to create new possibilities.

I'm most embarrassed at my art shows, even though I don't show it.

I'm always interested in people who are not orientated in art circles to become part of it.

Art needs to stand for something.

God wants worshipers before workers; indeed the only acceptable workers are those who have learned the lost art of worship.

Movie queens diffuse into Cinema haze, while libertines read pornozines in street cafes.

She doesn't give you time for questions as she locks up your arms in hers. And you follow till your sense of direction completely disappears.

Midget wrestling on channel 3, it costs me 50 bucks a month.

I dated Siamese twins, I slept with Big Foot, too. Get me on Sally Jesse, put me on Donahue.

Art should stimulate.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

There is nothing in art, in philosophy, or in politics to match the fervor of mutual cooperation among discordant bands of fanatics.

The singing of sea shanties as working songs at sea is a lost art

I firmly believe that the only reason why I'm on this planet, the only reason why I live, breathe, and exist is, that it's my duty to be as honest as possible in my art.

I hear you're losing weight again, Mary Jane. Do you ever wonder who you're losing it for?

Trauma happens in relationships, so it can only be healed in relationships. Art can't provide healing. It can be cathartic and therapeutic but a relationship is a three-part journey.

I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.

Art and resistance are great together. That's what art's made for. Look at Vincent van Gogh: He didn't cut off his ear because he was selling well.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

Without freedom there is no art.

Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.

Each of us visits this Earth involuntarily, and without an invitation. For me, it is enough to wonder at the secrets.

Agreements about what is good or not, are usually not worth much. It is very much like art, is it not an art to lead a good life?

In art, I think it's not useful to be a professional of the profession. It will not give you something new.

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

I am not a commercial industry creator. I don't believe in making art to make money.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.

I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

We will die, but art will remain.

History is too slow for our life, for our hearts.

Seeing your work go into storage in an art museum is obviously a tragedy of any cultural product - which doesn't mean I am anti-institutional.

In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.

I wanted to contribute to the landscape tradition in art. By now I guess we are comfortable with the thought that man has been everywhere or affected everything in nature.

I think the challenges that come with the responsibility of art directing something is something that appeals to me.

So-called restoration is at least as tricky as brain surgery. Most pictures expire under scalpel and sponge.

The magician depends for the success of his art upon the credulity of the people. Whatever mystifies, excites curiosity; whatever in turn baffles this curiosity, works the marvelous.

It has always been recognized that chess is an art, and its best practitioners have been described as artists.

Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain, These mix'd with art, and to due bounds confin'd Make and maintain the balance of the mind.