Top 1200 Great Art Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

Who would be an artist that was perfectly happy? Maybe nowadays, but when I grew up in the '60s, you had nobody in the art club who was popular. No cheerleaders in the art club. I was told that I couldn't be a painter by my first painting teacher. I said I wanted to go to Cooper and be an art student, and he said, "You'll be a waitress." It was really the strangely indifferent parenting.

The art is more important than the artist. The work is more important than the person who does it. You must be prepared to sacrifice all the you could possibly have, be, or do; you must be willing to go all the way for your art. If it is a question between choosing between your life and a work of art -- any work of art -- your decision is made for you.

The Voice of the River is a beautifully written, deeply inclusive and profoundly spirtual work of art. I am moved by its great genorosity above all, and its wisdom. It is a gift like no other.

It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.

In this kind of super-capitalistic society, everything is turned into money. And one of the great things about art is it isn't worth anything. It's absolutely free. It's going to get made no matter what.

Art is great. At its best, it engages the intellect and challenges the spirit; it connects us across history and reminds us of our humanity.

I love movies; I grew up loving movies. I've always loved movies. I never thought about making movies until I took art classes and then I started studying different artists. As you study paintings, you see light and shadow, of course - Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix. You start to understand the relationship between people and art, and images. For me, between movies that I watched and art, it was like, I'd love to make moving art. Moving pictures.

Wanting an honest opinion about my art from someone whose opinion I respect makes me feel vulnerable. It's a great space to be in.

The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires

If I hear dance music, my body starts to move. Whatever the dance music is, I can't help it. With all that, I still felt, well, rock is a little higher art, but it wasn't. Right now, because I have so much experience with dance charts, I started to realize that it's incredible art. This is going to be known one day as high art.

Art is a spiritual function of man, which aims at freeing him from life's chaos. Art is free in the use of its means in any way it likes, but is bound to its laws and to its laws alone. The minute it becomes art, it becomes much more sublime than a class distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

Making films is great. You've got 100 people around and you're all dressing up and making weird art - it's a fun group activity.

Art is a thing where, the least likely thing that you think is going to be art, is precisely the thing that is going to be art. And I would even hold that true to a reality television show... maybe the entire overarching process of the show actually exists as an artistic structure.

Whether we know it or not, we are all in a quest after the Great Companion. All study, all art, all music, all literature, all government, all industry are in essence a search after the Infinite.

As a great democratic society, we have a special responsibility to the arts. For art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color. What freedom alone can bring is the liberation of the human mind and a spirit which finds its greatest flowering in the free society. I see of little more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than the full recognition of the place of the artist.

Great art must proceed to precision and brevity. It presupposes the alert mind of an educated listener who, in a singleact of thinking, includes with every concept all associations pertaining to the complex.

Jack Sturtzer, one of my cousins, had gone to art school and suggested that I might be interested in a private school called the Art Institute of Buffalo, and in fact that is what happened. So upon graduation in 1948, I then went to stay with my cousins on Seventeenth Street and enrolled in the program at the Art Institute on Elmwood Avenue.

For me, the idea of curating can be expanded. Curating science, curating art, music and theater and performance and not only bring those things into art but bring art into those areas.

I'm really into the recycling of art. That one piece of art inspires another piece of art, which inspires another piece of art. I really like that idea.

My idea of a great holiday is not to go out. It's to find somewhere where I'm not confronted by people coming up to me and saying, 'You're Art Malik, aren't you?' It's quite nice sometimes not to be recognised.

There is a way to support the art and to allow and encourage the art to flourish while being critical. In fact, I find in teaching that self-critique is one of the best ways to have your art grow, but if you start tearing yourself down then, it's not going to go anywhere. I feel the same about critics. I feel that's happening all too often.

For thousands of years, we've insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.

if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.

Making films is great. You've got 100 people around and you're all dressing up and making weird art-it's a fun group activity.

For goodness sakes, beware of curls… It is a great art to do them so that the girls not only look modern - but do not suddenly look very vulgar.

Certainly, in college, I had no idea what I wanted to do, I studied art history and had a great time, but I didn't have any sort of career aspirations.

I like the boundaryless potential you get when you make work for a context that is open to interpretation. Thinking about an art context is too claustrophobic, though. I always hope that at least half my audience is not directly related to the art world. I use art as a balancing act. It's a good way of avoiding everyday chores and social obligations.

I started studying as an artist, but I got fed up with the fact that you can paint terrible pictures and if you explain them in an erudite way it's called great art. I thought this was rubbish.

I feel genius in great works of art. I have seen medical cures that science can't explain, some seemingly triggered by faith. The same is true of millions of other people.

I feel that performing is its own art form, and recording is its own art form, and writing is its own art form, and that they all can happen simultaneously but at different paces.

An important document of the paper of record at a crucial, make-or-break juncture in its long, glorious history, and a love letter to the dying art form that is the great American newspaper.

Look. Art knows no prejudice, art knows no boundaries, art doesn't really have judgement in it's purest form. So just go, just go.

I absolutely consider fashion a form of art. Of course, there is some fashion that is not art at all - it's utilitarian, made for the purpose of covering up. And there are a lot of people out there who put a lot of effort into looking awful. But there are also people putting the same amount of energy into making bad art.

I think that nudity is beautiful. Sometimes it can be awful, but when it's beautiful? Cinema is the art about reality; it's art from reality. In French we say l'art de la realite. You show reality, so you have to show bodies.

Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions. Art can change the way we see the world. Art can create an analogy.

For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying art is something they expect of themselves as civilized persons, but they're unsure how to do so. They aren't even sure which of the visible objects are art and which are furniture, clothes, hors d'oeuvres, or construction rubble, and whether a pile of dead and decomposing rats is deliberate art or just another pile of decomposing rats.

Fairfield Porter who has been my model for art writing all along, said that if the most interesting thing about a work of art is its content, it's probably a failure. I think it's true that if you find yourself thinking about the meaning in an author's message, it's probably not very interesting as art. Obviously, this is a tough concept, because if you withdraw intention.

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

I believe it is no wrong Observation, that Persons of Genius, and those who are most capable of Art, are always fond of Nature, as such are chiefly sensible, that all Art consists in the Imitation and Study of Nature. On the contrary, People of the common Level of Understanding are principally delighted with the Little Niceties and Fantastical Operations of Art, and constantly think that finest which is least Natural.

I was in Paris last year, where there's a great appreciation of many different aspects of African culture and of black culture. The music... the art... whatever... And I kind of went with that.

There is one great and universal wish of mankind expressed in all religions, in all art and philosophy, and in all human life: the wish to pass beyond himself as he now is.

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.

People want to be successful, and they want to be acknowledged for what they do. Sometimes they make really great art and aren't. Historically, the best artists weren't. But their work survived.

He was the first to conceive of movies as an art form. His belief was that if the traditional art form would not find room for him, then he would make an art form of his own.

I've been an art collector since the Sixties, and I kept it very separate from my showbusiness career. I've had art shows since the early Nineties, a museum show that travelled to four countries. I've had three or four art books; it's just another way I have to tell stories.

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker's attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

Ill-informed intuition is fantastic - it's what great art is. So really old painters or writers or actors are brilliant, because they've finally reached the point when they can let go of al technique.

They are the best physicians, who being great in learning most incline to the traditions of experience, or being distinguished in practice do not reflect the methods and generalities of art.

In the USA, we learn "art history" as Western art history, and the history of Asian, or African art is a special case; we learn politics by examining our own government system, and consider other systems special cases, and the same is true of philosophy.

The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.

The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory - disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness. If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

I used to think that great art happened without argument, and maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the things that are most important in this life, you have to fight for.

Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.

I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting - of art in general - which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.

Everything great in science and art is simple. What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity - gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph?

Art thou in misery, brother? Then I pray Be comforted. Thy grief shall pass away. Art thou elated? Ah, be not too gay; Temper thy joy: this, too, shall pass away. Art thou in danger? Still let reason sway, And cling to hope: this, too, shall pass away. Tempted art thou? In all thine anguish lay One truth to heart: this, too, shall pass away. Do rays of loftier glory round thee play? Kinglike art thou? This, too, shall pass away! Whate'er thou art, wher'er thy footsteps stray, Heed these wise words: This, too, shall pass away.