ART QUOTES XIV
quotations about art
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
letter to his son John, 1927
Art is but a mirror, which gives back what is cast on its surface faithfully only while unsullied.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for.
JULIAN BARNES
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
The scope of art is practically boundless; it does not begin and end with the painting of pictures and the modeling of statues; where there is room for workmanship there is room for it.
LEWIS FOREMAN DAY
Everyday Art
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Art is not imitation but illusion.
CHARLES READE
Christie Johnstone
It seems to me that the arts are rather flourishing. There's an awful lot of bad art about because of this, but that's true of every great era. I'm sure there was a lot dreadful art in the Renaissance that we fortunately don't see today.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Atlantic, Oct. 15, 1997
I'd always thought of art as something that was expressed through certain tools: painting, sculpture, photography, writing, film, music, architecture. And yes, performance. But this performance went beyond performance. This was life.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Walk Through Walls: A Memoir
Art is long, and the talk about it is even longer.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
Making art is dealing with people on your own terms. The ideal way of using people is using them like clay, but that being out of the question, except for lunatics and leaders, art is a good alternative.
LUCAS SAMARAS
"Another Autointerview", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Pleasures of Life
The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form -- to make it true and real to the theme, not to life.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"A Note on Realism", The Literary Review, Oct. 25, 1924
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
MAXIM GORKY
Untimely Thoughts
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.
TOM ROBBINS
Skinny Legs and All
Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.
NADINE GORDIMER
Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1991
The artist's path sometimes is slippery as well. I just have to stay on it.
KRISHNA MATHIAS
"With preparation, making art is inevitable", Press of Atlantic City, March 8, 2016
If you are really creatively engaged with the thing we call ART, it is a 24/7 preoccupation. It can and does seep into all areas of your life.
JAMES GUPPY
"Judging art is a classic business", Echo Netdaily, March 16, 2016
The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
WALT WHITMAN
preface, Leaves of Grass