Top 1200 Greek Art Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

We can't suddenly quit a job and then race to find a form of art that will pay off before the next mortgage payment is due. Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it … Art isn’t about the rush of victory that comes from being picked. Nor does it involve compliance. Art in the post-industrial age is a lifelong habit, a stepwise process that incrementally allows us to create more art.

If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth nothing new in art but reenacts upheavals on the symbolic plane of language. It provides the consoling belief that overthrows are occurring as in the past, that barriers to creation are being surmounted, and that art is pursuing a radical purpose, even if it is only the purpose of doing away with itself.

The art world is never going to be popular like the NFL, but more people are buying art and I think that's cushioning, to a great extent, our art-market cycles.

Art is not entertainment. Art is not luxury goods. Art is culture. It is you and me.

For photography to be an art involves reformulating notions of art, rejecting both material and formal purism and also the separation of art from commerce as distinct semiotic practices that never interlock.

Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.

I am not so sure whether what we do now is art or something not quite art. If I call it art, it is because I wish to avoid the endless arguments some other name would bring forth.

My art collection is dominated by tribal art from Nigeria where I taught school, from New Guinea where we've travelled, and by Canadian Haida pieces. My own art is either on exhibition or owned by other people!

I've always been interested in art and making things, but I chose not to go to art school because I thought I needed to do something else. Art was a tough way to make a living.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

For my part, it was Greek to me.

Stand-up is an art but since it's humor and it's funny - a lot of guys that don't think it's art are probably coming from the angle that they don't want to take it so seriously. I've always looked at it as an art but I don't look at it as a pretentious art. I understand it has to be taken lightly because it is just comedy in the end, but the good stand-up comics are someone with something to say.

Of course, museums and galleries and art spaces will continue to ground the art world. But certainly the public - as well as artists - also benefit when art is encountered in other everyday situations.

I did not go to art school thinking that I was an artist; I went there mainly doing stage sets for bands. I considered my work more as an applied art for musicians, not as art in and for itself.

I'm Greek, and we're conspiratorial by nature.

I very much enjoyed Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? I can't quote it, it's been a while, but at the end of the day, the idea is that "art that does good in the world is art, and what doesn't is not. It's propaganda or something else. It's bad."

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

There are some disabling myths about what art is, how to do it, what is good art, and what art is for, that have gagged generations, depriving them of significant and natural means of expression. This is a terrible loss and an unnecessary one.

Without Greek studies there is no education.

I don't believe too much in originality... you learn art from other art and then looking into somebody's face or landscape is the point of departure to do your work of art.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

If art is singular expression, then by nature, the best art is controversial. But when art stirs debate for reasons besides its artistic integrity, that's when things get bent.

Living together is an art. It's a patient art, it's a beautiful art, it's fascinating.

Some critics claim to know what art has to be and do, and consider it their task to steer art along the path they have chosen. Others receive art gladly, and try to distinguish degrees of excellence.

Art used to be painting, sculpture, music, etc, but now, all technology has become art. Of course, this form of art is still very primitive, but it is slowly replacing reality.

Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated...The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life... The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength.

My Greek relatives I think probably are vampires.

Often, when art from the canon is brought in to fine art classes, it is used as a prop to inspire art-making projects but more rarely as something to study in-depth for itself.

I always felt that my work hadn't much to do with art; my admirations for other art had very little room to show themselves in my work because I hoped that if I concentrated enough the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures. I ignored the fact that art, after all, derives from art. Now I realize that this is the case.

The Greek people are entrepreneurial.

Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than a mixture and dispersion. Why, then, art thou disturbed? Say to this ruling faculty, Art thou dead, art thou corrupted, art thou playing the hypocrite, art thou become a beast, dost thou herd and feed with the rest?

I believe Picasso's success is just one small part of the broader modern phenomenon of artists themselves rejecting serious art- perhaps partly because serious art takes so much time and energy and talent to produce-in favor of what I call `impulse art': art work that is quick and easy, at least by comparison.

This is a very special Greek kind of socialist, all the social democratic parties in Europe are against this idea and I think that the dividing line today in the Greek political system is not the centre right or socialist, the real dividing line is between those parties and those political forces who really believe that Greece should stay in the Eurozone and make the efforts and change, and make the reforms and change the old and Mr Tsipras who is really resisting any kind of change in Greece.

I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.

I was asked in 1969 by Lucy Lippard to define art. I think at the time I said that art was a matter of life and death, meaning just the breathing and living and thinking experience-that's what art is.

The training of the mind is an art. If this can be considered art, one's life is art.

When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective.

To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.

Macedonia was, is and will forever be Greek.

I'm not really well educated - other than an art survey course at the High School of Art and Design in New York when I was, like, 15. I don't know the history of art, but I got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was allowed to feel whatever I want and like whatever I want.

I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.

Art can heal it if art is allowed to exist. And if art is slowly wiped off the face of the planet, then what tools do we have to reach people, to appeal to them and all of their senses?

I worked in an art gallery for a few years, doing administrative assistance stuff, and it exposed me to what the whole world of art dealers and the art market was about.

If an artist does not have an erotic involvement with everything that he sees, he may as well give up. To be a human being may a very messy thing, but to be an artist is something else entirely, because art is religion, art is sex, art is society. Art is everything.

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

Art is not fashionable. That's why fashion and art are two different things. Fashion can never be art because fashion deals with whim, what is temporary, what changes, what is transient, what is now and not now. Art has to deal with issues that are timeless, that never change.

What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from . . . pure commodities? A work of art is a gift, not a commodity. . . works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies”, a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.

Dancing is a very living art. It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art. A dancer's art is lived while he is dancing. Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories--when his dancing days are over.

Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra. ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism.

There's obviously always danger in making music or art for art's sake. Even as Christians we can be guilty of that, being more about the art than the Artist who gave us this gift.

Art, like real estate, is half science, half gut. We go to a lot of art fairs. We have two full-time art experts who help me make all the decisions about how to build the corporate and personal collection and what we put in our developments. We don't let interior designers pick art for us.

No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

When you talk about state of the art, that doesn't mean a damn thing. Think about it. State of the art. "This is the state of the art brush from Winsor-Newton." Yeah, but the state of the art sucks rubber donkey lungs.

Am I the only person who hopes that David Beckham has sex with Brad Pitt? I don't know who's in charge of casting in Hollywood, but make it happen before one of them is out of their prime. Can you imagine those two men together making love? If there's a man in here that's junk doesn't wiggle just a little bit at the thought of those two men together - this has nothing to do with your homophobic sexual preference. At that level it's art, you monkey. You should be honored that you share the same restroom with those Greek gods.

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.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.