Top 1200 Art Forms Quotes & Sayings - Page 14

By and large, the making of serious, thoughtful and occasionally valuable art has become a lonely persuasion, while the marketing of art has become a boutique operation, manipulated by fashion, self-serving art scholars and the vagaries of the auction block.

True art means if it helps you to become silent, still, joyous; if it gives you a celebration, if it makes you dance—whether anybody participates with you or not is irrelevant. If it becomes a bridge between you and God, that is true art. If it becomes a meditation, that is true art. If you become absorbed in it, so utterly absorbed that the ego disappears, that is true art.

Artists used to argue about art for art's sake versus social realism etc, and now it's like the most dominate argument is related to "art for the market's sake." It's a necessity, somewhat, for some people.

the art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbour shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in your own favour'.

If you're serious about singing or acting, which are two art forms that get repetitive, the way to keep the music fresh is to recognize that it is totally impossible for it to ever be the same, night after night. You open your mouth and you'd like a certain sound to come out of it, but it doesn't always come out exactly like you thought it was going to come out!

I can never fathom it when people say things like "I can't understand abstract art!" Or: "Abstract art is junk!" Or: "Abstract art isn't as valid as realism!"

Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.

Living through art is a better way to live - not necessarily making art, but being surrounded by art. I think it's just as banal as trying to show my version of the beauty in the world. It's about beauty at the end of the day.

There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to the heaven and away from hell-Art and Science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.

The word “art” is something the West has never understood. Art is supposed to be a part of a community. Like, scholars are supposed to be a part of a community... Art is to decorate people’s houses, their skin, their clothes, to make them expand their minds, and it’s supposed to be right in the community, where they can have it when they want it... It’s supposed to be as essential as a grocery store... that’s the only way art can function naturally.

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

I do think there is a link between the accidental art the sciences produce and the deliberate art the artist creates, but I can't help feeling that the innocence of the accidental art of science has a power and curious beauty that artists are hard-pressed to match.

He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful. "Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life." Thus sang the Rishis of the Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. "He is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life."

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

I never understood the low art/high art distinction. I think there's real currency in pop culture. We read trashy magazines as much as the next person. So I never saw the point in listening to only one thing. That low art/high art distinction comes from the establishment telling me how I'm supposed to think.

There are still two forms besides democracy and oligarchy; one of them is universally recognized and included among the four principal forms of government, which are said to be (1) monarchy, (2) oligarchy, (3) democracy, and (4) the so-called aristocracy or government of the best. But there is also a fifth, which retains the generic name of polity or constitutional government.

Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe... Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them. Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader. Maybe we think we are supposed to like tough books, but are we? Who says? Many writers (and art museums) produce for quite a small subsample of the... public.

I prefer reading novels. Short stories are too much like daggers. And now that I'm done with my collection I'm more interested in different forms of writing and other kinds of narrative art. I'm working on a screenplay. But when I was working on Eileen, I definitely felt like I was taking a piss. Like, here I am, typing on my computer, writing the "novel." It wasn't that it was insincere, but there was a kind of farcical feeling I had when I was writing.

I don't have a favorite place to see art. I like to encounter it anywhere, museum, gallery, home, studio, street... I do prefer to see good art, when I see art, but it doesn't matter where I see it.

As we grow older, we realize just how limiting were our earlier conceptions. Art is something else. Art is fluid, transmutable, open-ended, never complete, and never perfect. Art is an event.

Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don't want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own.

For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, it's perfect. You don't have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. That's where it's found. It's found within you.

Somehow, the whole idea of me writing art reviews was just too much of a complicated thought, but I liked art, and later on I just realized that it would be perhaps a pleasure, and so I decided to do it for 'Art in America' - a lot.

There is the specter of "realism" that is still haunting Chinese contemporary art - that art is only an instrument, an instrument to reflect society, that it must be useful for society. Also, I have noticed many Western media outlets are very insistent on understanding contemporary art in China through this kind of realist approach. Sometimes I even sense that they are intent on, as we say in China, "picking bones of politics out of an egg of art." Or perhaps they see art as merely an instrument to reflect society.

Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness,to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms.

We've reached a point where we are not a very empathetic people, and art without empathy is art without an audience. My basic viewpoint is that without art we're alone.

What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself.

For me, architecture is an art the same as painting is an art or sculpture is an art. Yet, architecture moves a step beyond painting and sculpture because it is more than using materials. Architecture responds to functional outputs and environmental factors. Yet, fundamentally, it is important for me to stress the art in architecture to bring harmony.

The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an 'Art Education'; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active mind, look into them for the things that belong to him, and he will find soon enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order.

Thou art in the end what thou art. Put on wigs with millions of curls, set thy foot upon ell-high rocks. Thou abidest ever--what thou art.

I think art is beautiful. It's decoration and adornment. But art is also a really important vessel for social change, and social change begins with thought. And so if you can find humor in something and take a moment to rethink it, you can take a step back and look at your values from a different angle. I think that's a really important way of carrying on with life. I think the best art for me is funny and the best comedy for me is art. Some of my favorite artists are comedians. Comedy is art, and art can be comedy, and the intersection is vital - at least for my own work.

[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. ...Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms...

There is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making.

I don't agree with most forms of censorship, and I especially don't agree with the idea that one needs to be from the same cultural, ethnic, or religious background as the subjects they portray in order to be qualified to portray those subjects. I believe that compassion and empathy should cross all of those category barriers, and the conversations art creates can be inflammatory initially, but I think are most often constructive and healing in the long run.

Most conservatives know better than to promote the state funding of art. The result of such funding is the mess that modern art has become. Atonal music is to music what subsidized art is to art. ...The fact that cacophony has reigned almost supreme since 1900 is a testimony to Mises' original observation. Atonal music is to music what socialism is to economics: planned chaos.

Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.

All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.

The only thing I collect is art. I collect it because I like looking at it. A lot of it is really personal stuff that my friends have made, paintings that my husband's mother made, and things that I bought. I buy abstract art on eBay, and I buy some outsider art on eBay, or what is called folk art, I buy a lot of. I have a lot of professional art work as well as more stuff my friends' kids make. To have a wall of art to look at, I feel really surrounded by love, because so much of the work is related to my friendships.

The bizarre but all too common transformation of the woman artist from a producer in her own right into a subject for representation forms a leitmotif in the history of art. Confounding subject and object, it undermines the speaking position of the individual woman artist by generalizing her. Denied her individuality, she is displaced from being a producer and becomes instead a sign for male creativity.

Art is not for the personal satisfaction of one or the other, but art wants to return all what's in life... Art wants to give back everything what's in our lives. The more comprehensive the artist stands in life the more powerful his work will speak, and therefore a work of art is a measure of the mental size of his creator.

For the art-historically informed, no art has truly shocked since November 19, 1971, when Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm by a friend, at F-Space in Santa Ana, California. Sliced cows and surgically altering one's own face is aftershock art.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

Never did much art till I was in my 30s, except for painting video sets, designing record covers and T-shirts, and making zines and stuff. I thought I was too punk for art and felt grossed out by white-room galleries and art people.

The two most important forms of diversity when it comes to innovation are visible diversity (typically skin color, age, gender, etc.) and underrepresentation (anytime someone is less than 15% of the majority group). Other forms of diversity are also relevant but these are the ones that psychologically play the most role in how someone engages with the innovative process.

Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist andthe broad outlook of a group are visible,... communicating and fixing certain values of religious, social, and moral life through the emotional suggestiveness of forms. It is, besides, a common ground against which innovations and individuality of particular works may be measured.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.

All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons.

Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.

It's really hard to write about art in general. But it's exceptionally hard to fictionalize art and make work that isn't a parody, or is something that could withstand critique and exist in the art world as a valuable object, or a true piece.

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.

By the grey woods, by the swamp, where the toad and newt encamp, by the dismal tarns and pools, where dwell the Gouls. By each spot the most unholy, by each nook most melancholy, there the traveller meets, aghast, sheeted memories of the Past. Shrouded forms that start and sigh, as they pass the wanderer by. White-robed forms of friends long given; In agony, to the Earth - and Heaven.

You don't own art. What does that mean? We are trustees of art. Art is in transit with us. That is why an auction is a wonderful thing. You clap your hands and the objects fly away like doves and find other places where they will be protected, loved. That's what I believe.

I don't believe that fiction is dead. I know there are some people who believe that it's an outdated art form, and that to express truth today you need to work in different forms, to write books where it's perhaps not clear what's fiction and what's memoir. I have nothing against those books and love many of them very much. But we have enough space for everyone, traditional realists and hybrid writers, and experimental writers all.

When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.

I have given no definition of love. This is impossible, because there is no higher principle by which it could be defined. It is life itself in its actual unity. The forms and structures in which love embodies itself are the forms and structures in which love overcomes its self-destructive forces.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species.

A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction, he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions, but also entire world view, he is the inventor of entire forms of like.

Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law - one may call it an iron law of Nature - which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind.

I think furniture is art. I don't think art is just for your walls - I think everything that someone has made is a piece of art.