A Quote by Alton Tobey

Art is the lens through which I experience the world. Art is the medium to present the human condition... love, fear, bewilderment, pleasure, distaste, brotherhood and all the subtleties that we all know.

Alton Tobey

Quote Topics

Art Art Is Bewilderment Brotherhood Condition Distaste Experience Fear Human Human Condition Know Lens Love Medium Pleasure Present Subtleties Through Which World

Quote Author

Alton Tobey
American - Painter
November 15, 1914 - January 4, 2005

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Susan Sontag

I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.

Carl Andre

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Susan Sontag

Art can no longer be art today if it does not reach into the heart of our present culture and work transformatively within it that is, an art which cannot mould society — and through this naturally operate upon the core questions of our society — is not art.

Joseph Beuys

Anything that reflects the human condition back on humans in the entertainment medium is art.

Tucker Max

I think…to give. In the best way I can, through song and through dance and through music. I mean, I am committed to my art. I believe that all art has as its ultimate goal the union between the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. I believe that to be the reason for the very existence of art. And I feel I was chosen as an instrument to just give music and love and harmony to the world. To children of all ages, and adults and teenagers.... I love people of all races from my heart, with true affection.

Michael Jackson

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

Clement Greenberg

Maybe this is a utopian view of art but I do believe that art can function as a vehicle, that it isn't just a cultural pursuit, something that happens in art galleries. Unless art is linked to experience and the fear and joy of that, it becomes mere icing on the cake.

Antony Gormley

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Edward Steichen

Art exists for the human species. I think that all of the people who love art, those who teach art, and all of you should burn with the obligation to save the world.

Shinichi Suzuki

Art Exists for the human species. I think that all of the people who love art, those who teach art, and all of you should burn with the obligation to save the world

Shinichi Suzuki

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling.

Leo Tolstoy

Improvisation is the art of becoming sound. It is the only art in which a human being can and must become the music he or she is making. Improvisation is the only musical art which predicated entirely on human trust and love.

Alvin Curran

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator... Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.

Seth Godin

For me, there has always been a disconnect with the sort of elitist structure of the high-art world - and my distaste for that is at odds with my feeling that art should aspire to do great things.