A Quote by Gustave Courbet

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

Gustave Courbet

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Art Condemned Fatal Forced Mediocrity Official Respectability Sterile

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Gustave Courbet
French - Artist
June 10, 1819 - December 31, 1877

A musical audience is at best uninspiring, at worst definitely drab. ... Respectability hangs like a pall over the orchestra and the boxes; a sort of sterile sobriety ill-fitted to the passionate geometry of music.

Marya Mannes

A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business.

Walter Bagehot

It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!

Emile Zola

Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world.

Dan Graham

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

William E. Gladstone

I don't know if street art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy. So maybe the art should stay outside.

Banksy

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Margot Fonteyn

If advertising is not an official or state art, it is nonetheless clearly art.

Michael Schudson

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Charles Baudelaire

The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. . . . Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.

James Agee

In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity — please observe, a plodding mediocrity — for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.

Benjamin Cardozo

What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?

Thomas Carlyle

I'm a true believer in not forcing anything. I hate forced art, forced anything.

Denison Witmer

To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death.

John Lancaster Spalding

So-called Chinese art and culture is under control of the Party. They exist to serve the official agenda. I call it fake art and culture.

Ai Weiwei

In 1978, I had a near-fatal car accident in the Bahamas. There was a point when I could have lost my right arm - but it was good because it forced me to slow down and take a break.

Peter Frampton

A Quote by Gustave Courbet

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