ART QUOTES VI
quotations about art
True art, like nature, ever bears
Suggestions of some higher thing;
As more than form or tint of bird
We prize the song he stops to sing.
EDITH WILLIS LINN FORBES
"A Landscape in Oils"
The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
MICHELLE OBAMA
remarks at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing, May 18, 2009
The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Death in the Afternoon
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
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
The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.
EDWARD ALBEE
Stretching My Mind
Realism and art cannot live together.
JENNETTE LEE
The Ibsen Secret
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO TOLSTOY
What is Art?
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"
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
W. H. AUDEN
"A Poet of the Actual", Forewords and Afterwords
I believe that economic prosperity and cultural wealth go hand in hand. This is why it is important to even further promote the cultural arts during times of economic slowdown.
OH SEUNG-JE
"All That Korean Art Is There for a Reason", New York Times, March 16, 2016
Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.
AMY LOWELL
Tendencies in Modern Poetry
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
REBECCA WEST
The Strange Necessity
Art is one of man's few serious activities.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Letters to a Young Artist
But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology
Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
NORMAN MAILER
Western Review, winter 1959
The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
WILLIAM JAMES
letter to Henry Rutgers Marshall, Feb. 7, 1899