ART QUOTES V
quotations about art
Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
Killing Yourself to Live
Nature is a haunted house -- but Art -- a House that tries to be haunted.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, 1876
The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art is a little subversive, very subversive; it gets underneath the surface and reveals what is there; it is a Geiger counter for truth.
PAT B. ALLEN
Art Is a Spiritual Path
No art is possible without a dance with death.
KURT VONNEGUT
Slaughterhouse-Five
If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way?
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
All passes. Art alone
Enduring stays to us;
The Bust outlasts the throne,--
The Coin, Tiberius.
HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON
Ars Victrix
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
JAMES BALDWIN
Esquire, April 1960
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Art Like Morality Consists in Drawing the Line Somewhere
Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.
LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON
Speak
One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Reifications"
The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilization, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
Whether it is the beautiful that brings to our hearts the love of truth and justice, or whether it is truth that teaches us how to find the beautiful in nature and how to love it, in either case art does a noble work. It drags out the soul from its everyday shell, and brings it under the spell of its own mysterious and wonderful power, so that a memory of this experience stays with the people, sustains them in their daily labors, and refines their minds.
HELENA MODJESKA
"Women and the Stage", The World's Congress of Representative Women
That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.
DANA SPIOTTA
Innocents and Others
All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.
ROMAN PAYNE
Rooftop Soliloquy
Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On the Level of Desire"
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO TOLSTOY
What is Art?
Never judge a work of art by its defects.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern