ARTIST QUOTES
quotations about artists
An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty -- a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III", L'art romantique
The artist is the compass which, through the raging of the storm, points steadily to the north.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.
PABLO PICASSO
attributed, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
Artists are always good for conversation, so long as you want to talk about their art.
CRAIG JOHNSON
The Cold Dish
An artist's business is only to see.
HENRY ADAMS
Esther
Why is it that writers are often excluded from the title of artist? If an artist is simply a person who creates art and does so with such skill as to elevate themselves and their work from their peers, then how are writers any different from the people who create music, films, or sculptures?
NICHOLAS LAROUSSE
"An Artist's Way: In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri", Everyday eBook, March 2, 2016
For decades, artists have moved into dilapidated neighborhoods and created a hip buzz. Commercial development follows that buzz. Ultimately, the artists are priced out of the areas they helped to gentrify.
MARCIE SILLMAN
"Artists Are Taking Over The Empty Capitol Hill Value Village (For Now)", KUOW, March 7, 2016
A true artist never portrays to please, but to show.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
Levels
It's easy to denigrate artists as self-indulgent pansies. From Plato's Republic to H.G. Wells' modern Utopia, literary visions of a perfect world have routinely shed the "useless" artist in favor of the practical artisan. We don't need painters to survive. Not exactly. But society devolves very quickly once the artists are gone. Come the Apocalypse, and musicians, dancers, writers and artists of every shape and stripe will simply have vanished from the dystopian landscape.
PAULA YOUNG
"#JusticeForFlint's radical love: While Oscar's glamour beckoned, the real artists helped Flint be seen and heard", Salon, February 29, 2016
Many emerging artists cannot afford studios, so they turn to the infinite space and creative resources online. This has given rise to "post-studio practice", where Generation Y artists work mainly from their laptops and outsource major practical aspects of their work.
HANNAH ELLIS-PETERSON
"Where have all the art punks gone?", The Guardian, March 16, 2016
When a simple sign on a stick and a clever chant aren't getting your protest point across, why not consider a sculpture, tapestry or performance piece? Artists across the world are taking their talents to the streets to support a variety of political, social and economic protests.
ILANA NOVICK
"How Artists Are Using Their Work to Break Political Boundaries", Alternet, March 17, 2016
Being an artist is emotionally hard, beyond being difficult to do, especially living in New York City, where everything is so expensive. There's the burden to make money from art. I think that is emotionally taxing and potentially toxic to your own art.
RYDER RIPPS
"How to make it as an artist in New York", Money MT, March 20, 2016
Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Loneliness", Winesburg, Ohio
The artist ... walks at first with his companions, till one day he falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above, only to re-immerse itself in the solitude of the limestone and carry him along its winding tunnel, until it gushes out through the misty creeper-hung cave which he has always believed to exist, and sets him back in the sun.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Condemned Playground
Theologically, what are we to make of this superhuman inflation of the artist? One reaction is simply to insist that we cut the artist down to size, in the hope that by demoting the artist we will promote God. Creation-talk belongs to God alone, we are told, and any slippage of that language into the human sphere is to be shunned. The sentiment is understandable, but without qualification it is liable to lead to dead ends. To imagine that by dethroning the artist we thereby make room for God will all too easily encourage a zero-sum game in which divine and human are seen as essentially unrelated, pitted against each other, vying for the same space. The more of God, the less of us; the less of God, the more of us.
JEREMY BEGBIE
Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts
This idea of an artist as a single person, sitting in the studio all day, is a myth now. It's unaffordable and unrealistic. Every artist is in this precarious world. Everyone does five different jobs to support themselves. Some might be coders, others working on feature films or building apps. But what's interesting is that people will bring the tools from their day jobs into their art. And that's how new practices have emerged.
KATE COOPER
"Where have all the art punks gone?", The Guardian, March 16, 2016
Every Artist is a Cannibal, every Poet is a Thief.
All kill for inspiration and sing about their grief.
BONO
"The Fly"
There's nothing more tragic than artists from the 70s still doing art from the 70s.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
The Guardian, May 12, 2014