ART QUOTES XI
quotations about art
Aesthetic culture is not the high-road to all the virtues, and, indeed, certain of the vices have been known to infest it. Neither, on the other hand, is there any special grace in ugliness. Art is only utterance. It must express something; and the vital question is, what does it express?
LEWIS FOREMAN DAY
Everyday Art
Art is a means to enter, to play with, to dance with, to wrestle with anything that intrigues, delights, disturbs, or terrifies us.
PAT B. ALLEN
introduction, Art Is a Spiritual Path
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
The swing of art is circular, from form to formalism, from formalism to formlessness, from formlessness to form again.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art achieves all little things by absolute truth: but all her great things need some admixture of illusion.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
The artist and the multitude are natural enemies. They always will be, both ways. The artist is an enemy of the multitude, and the multitude is the enemy of the artist. And when the disguise comes off and they're both standing facing one another, they're just there at odds end.
ROBERT ALTMAN
interview with F. Anthony Macklin, 1976
There is no surer way of evading the world than by Art; and no surer way of uniting with it than by Art.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
If the world were clear, art would not exist.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus
They say that art should stand the test of time. Life lasts a limited amount of time. Mountains and trees and earth will outlive human beings, but we don't know if they will be here always. Art does outlast the life span of its maker. Art should communicate to an increasing circle of strangers--people who do now know the artist, but come to know the work, and through the work, come to know something about the humanity of the artist that rings with their own humanity.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
Letters to a Young Artist
Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Back to Methuselah
In every work of art, the artist himself is present.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
Levels
The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.
ANDRE GIDE
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is difficult to prove that any age has been propitious for the artist; Socrates was condemned to death, so were Seneca and Petronius, Dante was exiled, the age of Louis XIV was one of both civil and religious persecution; the nineteenth century, as the lawsuits against Flaubert, Baudelaire, Hugo, etc., show, was not much better; and in the twentieth century there are whole tracts of Europe where to be a writer is to invite a firing-squad. "Silence, exile, and cunning" are the artist's lot, and, exquisite though his happiness will be when his public, educated at last, mobs him like a film-star, we may be wiser to assume that, for our lifetime, "silence, exile, and cunning" it will remain.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Condemned Playground
The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature... (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms).
DONALD BARTHELME
"The Sandman"
In the arts, people are always waiting for someone or some movement to "fulfill her/its/his promise." Then, half-a-dozen or a dozen years on, others begin to realize that, really, something extraordinary was actually happening.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
interview, SF Site, Apr. 2001
There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
speech to Royal Academy of Art, 1953
An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The Massachusetts Review, Summer, 1987