Top 1200 Works Of Art Quotes & Sayings - Page 11

When some say that good works are forbidden when we preach faith alone, it is as if I said to a sick man: "If you had health, you would have the use of all your limbs; but without health, the works of all your limbs are nothing"; and he wanted to infer that I had forbidden the works of all his limbs.

I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.

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.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.

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?

War destroys. War obliterates. War is ruination. And war begets more war. After thousands of years of experience proving this, and reams of literature and countless works of art exposing it, when are people going to learn?

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

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.

I've always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don't just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them.

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

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.

I think a master craftsman is someone who is unpretentious. He has a physical object in front of him and, while he works with a higher aim, he doesn't let his personality get in the way of his art. It's simply about the task at hand and to make it as functional and necessary to the world as he can.

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.

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.

An artist who brings to his work a mind tolerably furnished with the general principles of art, and a taste formed upon the works of good artists ? in short, who knows in what excellence consists - will, with the assistance of models... be an overmatch for the greatest painter that ever lived who should be debarred such advantages.

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.

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.

I am all for art's finding a large audience. But the way that's happening now, with big works filling big galleries and bigger shows, is mostly stopping statements from being made. Or heard. Or talked about. Or really examined. It's watering things down.

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

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.

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.

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.

A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.

Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it works great.

These days there are painters that go inside a factory in order to be inspired by the noise of machines, so that it affects their works. Of course, artists need sensibility; sensibility towards their environment and their community, but when they are stirred enough by their experiences in their society they can create their art in small studios.

There is beauty when something works and it works intuitively.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I tell everybody, if you've got a band that works, it's a miracle. It's never going to be perfect, but if it works on some level, hold on to it with both hands and don't ever let it go.

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.

Whether people identify as feminists or not, if they're doing work that furthers a feminist cause, I think that's wonderful, like if it works for me, right, it works for the movement.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.

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

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.

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.

I adored 'Breaking The Waves,' so when Lars von Trier wanted me in 'Dogville,' I was beside myself with joy. He works in a way that nobody I've ever worked with works.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

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.

Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.

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.

Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, areeffectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.

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.

Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.

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.

Once there was a race, quite unlike the human race - quite. I have no way of describing to you what they looked like or how they lived, but they had one characteristic you can understand: they were creative. The creating and enjoying of works of art was their occupation and their reason for being.

Women's bodies are used to sell anything and everything because it works, it grabs people's attention, and advertisers aren't going to stop using something that works.

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!

Where God works, He works with men that work.

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.

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.

My dad has always taught me these words: care and share. That's why we put on clinics. The only thing I can do is try to give back. If it works, it works.

It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.