Top 1200 Public Art Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Art makes people do a double take and then, if they're looking at the picture, maybe they'll read the text under it that says, "Come to Union Square, For Anti-War Meeting Friday." I've been operating that way ever since - that art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself. In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.

The public library is a center of public happiness first, of public education next.

Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public.

Bullfighting can be an art Boxing can be an art Loving can be an art Opening a can of sardines can be an art

Art is frightening. Art isn't pretty. Art isn't painting. Art isn't something you hang on the wall. Art is what we do when we're truly alive. An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it (all of it, the work, the process, the feedback from those we seek to connect with) personally.

Maybe this is a utopian view of art but I do believe that art can function as a vehicle, that it isn't just a cultural pursuit, something that happens in art galleries. Unless art is linked to experience and the fear and joy of that, it becomes mere icing on the cake.

A lot of abstract painters seem to be doing everything all at once now. And so these different styles are jibing and not so jibing, and they're clashing. But they all seem to be working in their own domain. Whereas back in the '60s, man, it was kind of a dull world. It was a vital world. But it was kind of contained and not too recognized by the public. Now art is absolutely recognized by the public.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that is creative, passionate and personal. Art is the unique work of a human being created to touch another. Art is created to have an impact, to change someone else.

Much like teaching art to young art students age 10 to 15 or so on, you have to break it down into bite-sized pieces, essential components. You have to - you know, at this point I'm so used to operating within given assumptions about art. But when you're explaining art to art students or people who are new to this experience, you have to really go back to the fundamentals.

Art makes better humans, art is necessary in understanding the world and art makes people happy. Undeniably, art is not optional.

Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art.

Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

Art shouldn't be prohibited in public schools when kids in private schools always get it.

It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave of the public's group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service. The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but to know how to sway the public. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity - and I don't mean simple - it'll be good, and the public will know it.

The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one.

We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.

Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.

Prayer is a fine, delicate instrument. To use it right is a great art, a holy art. There is perhaps no greater art than the art of prayer. Yet the least gifted, the uneducated and the poor can cultivate the holy art of prayer.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

I think that a lot of artists have succeeded in making what I might call "curator's art." Everybody's being accepted, and I always want to say, "Really? That's what you've come for? To make art that looks a lot like somebody else's art?" If I am thinking of somebody else's art in front of your art, that's a problem.

A lot of times the mainstream public loves something, critics will hate it and then they'll think the public is stupid and they're above the public.

We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

I believe if a private citizen is able to affect public opinion in a constructive way, he doesn't have to be an elected public servant to perform a public service.

The diminution of public virtue is usually attended with that of public happiness, and the public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals.

After high school I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, and I began a formalized art education where we went through the history of art but we also went through the art of my contemporaries.

Infiltrating the mainstream was a natural extension of my street art. I've always tried to communicate ideas to the public as directly as possible.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

I'm just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City, Kansas. And I always thought that acting was art, writing was art, music was art, painting was art, and I've tried to keep that cultural vibe to my life.

I like art with a sense of humor. I don't have a huge art education to understand everything. I don't think that means that art has to be watered down to the lowest common denominator, though. I don't think you have to go to college to be able appreciate great art, but I like art that doesn't take itself too seriously.

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

In view of our public pledges, we public officials can never again go before the public merely promising election reform. The time for promises is past.

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

Some people don't think that what I do is art - but for me art exists by definition. The beautiful and most liberating thing about being an artist is the ability to say that what I make is art. Art exists because the author says so.

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

To me, music is art and fashion is art, but fame? Fame isn't art, but the person you become when you're famous - your alter ego - that's art.

There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art.

There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through

When political and business leaders tell the public - any public - 'We don't trust you to make the right decision' - they prejudice that electorate against the very proposals they want it to accept and undermine public confidence in themselves.

Believing in one’s own art becomes harder and harder when the public response grows fonder.

Being covered in white paint, you demonstrate behaviour intended to create a public nuisance, which did in fact cause offence to members of the public, and created a breach of the peace and public order.

Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

I believe if a private citizen is able to affect public opinion in a constructive way he doesn't have to be an elected public servant to perform a public service.

Welsh rugby has done its dirty washing in public. It's nothing new. We're a tribal bunch. If warring parties want to sway public opinion, they do it in the public arena.

My activism has to do with my conscience; I cannot let certain things slide without doing something. My public speaking is part of an art form that is cultural.

Art is personal, originating from dreams, ideas, neuroses; art is shared, harkening back to the humans around the fire; art imbues pleasure and power by enabling people to know reality...Art is a necessity because it is a way of knowing...Is the need for truth physiological? Art exists out of time...images may be different bu there is always a repetition- a thread.

Art history is fine. I mean, that's a discipline. Art history is art history, and you start from the beginning and you end up in artist in time. But art is a little bit different. Art is a conversation. And if there's no conversation, what the hell is it about?

Defining art is huge; I feel like it's such a subjective thing. It's more like what's not art. You know what I mean? I think there can be an art in the way people live their lives, and art can be a gift someone gives to somebody.

Some speak of the public as if it were someone with whom they have had dinner at the Leipzig Fair in the Hotel de Saxe. Who is this public? The public is not a thing, but rather an idea, a postulate, like the Church.

It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.

Becoming mature is not important for art. Technical perfection is not relevant to art. Precision in art is only achieved by total duty of loyalty. Love, lusciousness, birth and fertility are precise tools of art, like laws.

Discussions of Western civilization are too often confined to works of high art that reflect a relatively narrow element of public taste and experience.

With acting, I'm taking somebody else's work and interpreting it. Whereas with music, it's organic. It's completely myself. Nobody else is really involved with the beginning stages of it. Art is something that I haven't really put out to the public. There's a couple pictures on MySpace, but I haven't done a gallery opening or anything like that. Art is very personal to me. I haven't really shared it with too many people.

Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped people understand their own feelings...pictures that enriched their own experiences and celebrated their own lives. But the art establishment branded him an 'illustrator', a sentimental one at that. Real artists, they said were doing art for art's sake, not for the sake of the bourgeois public. Real artists were putting swiggles, smears or daubs of paint on the canvas. They were doing 'innovative' and 'creative' work. If they were hideous and grotesque; we know that's what life really is!

Art has to be severe. It cannot be commercial. It cannot be for the producer or even for the public. It has to be for oneself.

My focus and that of all members of the Government responsible for delivering services to the public is to make sure that the public sector can use all the skills it needs to do the job the public wants it to do.

Policy is largely set by economic elites and organized groups representing business interests with little concern for public attitudes or public safety, as long as the public remains passive and obedient.