A Quote by Eric Drooker

Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them ... art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself.

Eric Drooker

Quote Topics

Art Art Is End Eyeballs Itself Means Means To An End People Rather Simply Than Them

Quote Author

Eric Drooker
American - Novelist
Born: 1958

Art makes people do a double take and then, if they're looking at the picture, maybe they'll read the text under it that says, "Come to Union Square, For Anti-War Meeting Friday." I've been operating that way ever since - that art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself. In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

Eric Drooker

Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them. Especially if the picture is very beautiful or very sexy or just really weird, if it has some surreal element in it.

Eric Drooker

Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."

Aaron Scharf

In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

Eric Drooker

The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

Fernando Pessoa

Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If the means achieves the end then the means is good... the new Ministry has no other aim than to unite the nation behind the ideal of the national revolution.

Joseph Goebbels

The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences

William Whewell

It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.

William S. Burroughs

Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.

Modest Mussorgsky

...throughout the history of art it has been art itself - in all its forms - that has inspired art...today's photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself.

Van Deren Coke

To begin with, I hold that there is never an end; everything of which our life is composed, pictures and books as much as anything else, is a means only, in the sense that the work of art exists in the body of the movement of life. It may be a strong factor of progress and direction, but we cannot say that it is the end or reason of things, for it is so much implicated with them ; and when we are speaking of art we suddenly find that we are talking of life all the time.

Wyndham Lewis

If art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece.

Elizabeth Peyton

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.