Top 1200 Public Art Quotes & Sayings

The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged - not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist's only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied.

Beyond a narrow, elite audience, there is a pervasive sense from the side of the public that much contemporary art fails to connect - a failure not evident throughout centuries of earlier art.

What's interesting about art in public spaces is that the public really sort of takes over and uses it in ways that you didn't anticipate.

Hard information on the quantity of bogus art sold is difficult to come by, in part because fraud, when discovered by dealers and auction houses, is usually kept secret to boost public confidence in the art market.

The best art is about individualism, free self-expression and realising a unique, imaginative perspective- A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent.

Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

If people think of public art as something the public decides, it's impossible to make anything of substance.

The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual; that he is civilized, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts. And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public - to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values... I believe that it is in a certain devotion to concepts of truth that we discover values.

The art and architecture of the past that we know is that which remains. The best is that which remains where it was painted, placed or built. Most of the art of the past that could be moved was taken by conquerors. Almost all recent art is conquered as soon as it's made, since it's first shown for sale and once sold is exhibited as foreign in the alien museums. The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought. There is no constructive effort; there is no cooperative effort. This situation is primitive in relation to a few earlier and better times.

So at a time in which the media give the public everything it wants and desires, maybe art should adopt a much more aggressive attitude towards the public. I myself am very much inclined to take this position.

In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science.

Confidence and courage are special skills to the art ... Within the four walls of his study, the artist should be modest, work diligently and conscientiously. While for the public, he'll show himself audacious, yes even into cheerful boldness. And so a new public's darling has arisen.

Public office is a public trust, the authority and opportunities of which must be used as absolutely as the public moneys for the public benefit, and not for the purposes of any individual or party.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

The public has a right to art ... Art is for everybody.

Much of what's called 'public' is increasingly a private good paid for by users - ever-higher tolls on public highways and public bridges, higher tuitions at so-called public universities, higher admission fees at public parks and public museums.

The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing.

Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn't get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn't art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn't art.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

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.

Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. … I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.

A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

The public needs art - and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize that the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for a few and ignore the masses.

My job as art critic is to watch artists dance naked in public, and then I will, in turn, dance naked critically in public.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

As taxpayers, we have quietly accepted the fact that our taxes will be spent to pay big bucks for all sorts of ugly, twisted metal to be displayed in front of or inside government buildings, in the name of 'art' that was obviously never meant to give the public any enjoyment and often represented a thumbing of the artist's nose at the public.

I realized that the only possible response was to go to my wonderful local café, Maison Bertaux, check everyone was well, eat a little cake and then make art. To me, making art, and in particular public art, is always an assertion of our humanity and our strength.

During the last 35 years, the artists multiplied, the public grew enormously, the economy exploded, and so-called contemporary art became fashionable. All these parameters changed the art world form its previous aspects and fundamentals - the explosion of museums and institutions, explosion of Biennales and Triennials, explosion of money, explosion of interest, explosion of artists, explosion of countries interested in contemporary exhibitions, explosion of the public. Not to see that is to be more than blind.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.

Vain Art of the Fugue was the only one of my novels to be met with relative public recognition: it was nominated for the Prix Médicis by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Milan Kundera pocketed the prize instead and the public never clamored to buy it.

Public art existed all along, but ecological art just naturally grew out of my thinking and writings in that area for years. I didn't get involved in it; I started what then became a movement.

Graphic design is a popular art and a practical art, an applied art and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing ideas.

The art of cartooning is vulgarity. The only reason for cartooning to exist is to be on the edge. If you only take apart what they allow you to take apart, you're Disney. Cartooning is a low-class, for-the-public art, just like graffiti art and rap music. Vulgar but believable, that's the line I kept walking.

I became tired of submitting my art to a panel of corporate strategists who decide if it meets their standard of what gets into stores or not. It was quite simple for me: they act like judge and jury of my art, and that is unacceptable. I wanted to give it right to the public.

...it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public...should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.

I've always thought that there shouldn't be any limit to the things that are well designed. And I think that people who consider that art should only be kept for art galleries and doesn't have a role in public life, I think that's too narrow.

Nouns are seldom improved by the modifier 'public.' Few of us, given a private alternative, prefer public restrooms or public transportation or public displays of affection.

My art became very public.

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

Clothing is viral, impermanent in a way that public art cannot be. So I like thinking of how corporate-created clothing can be seen as a form of public art.

Public art is a unique type of art. It's very different to gallery art because it is something that we pass by every day and it inevitably creates a lot of discussion in a way that gallery art does not.

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.

If the paying public demands naturalistic art, then an artist can use his skills to produce such pictures - but these are to be clearly distinguished from the artist's own art.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the public's relationship to art has been weakened by a profound institutional reluctance to address the question of what art is for. This is a question that has, quite unfairly, come to feel impatient, illegitimate, and a little impudent.

The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.

The syllogism art for art's sake refers to that kind of painting which disregards, or is contrary to, public taste.

There are people who speculate at objects. I don't think that makes them evil or not evil. It doesn't matter; in order to speculate, it has to be made public. Once it's made public, it's functioned is art.

I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.

The Street is as large as consciousness itself. So, when creating art for the street, be mindful of where the public's head is at these days. Give the public a real alternative to the strict diet of celebrity gossip, religion, and un-reality television.

Scary in the idea it could be a little overwhelming to have 70 or 100 clowns in a public space. Intriguing in that it could be something interesting. I'm up for any kind of public art.

The art cars are the public transportation system. And that requires regulation because, lately, we've had art cars that don't want people on board and that want private parties, and that's in conflict with the communitarian feeling and the interactive aspect of society.

The definition of public art to me means everything and means nothing because for me, all art is public. Art has to be public by definition and in a way It has to be accessible to any audience not just a work in a museum or an art gallery.

It was Public Art, defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.

The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercized in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

Public art is ephemeral by nature. Google 's new project not only catalogs an artist's work but archives it and allows people to see the art long after it has disappeared.

dance is simply the refinement of human movement - walking, running, and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.